Many large companies use expensive brand tracking studies to understand the impact of their marketing efforts toward building awareness and generating customers. Panels and surveys can be conducted for tens of thousands of dollars and provide detailed data on metrics like aided and unaided awareness, But, why spend thousands of dollars when you get great data for free? These free sources cannot compare with an exhaustive brand study, but they can provide good indications of the effectiveness of your efforts.
And most importantly these free tools provide raw values allowing you to record and measure performance over time. With several months' worth of data, you can learn a great deal about your brand's current online recognition score, buzz and traffic potential.
1- Topsy
Topsy, a social search engine, provides excellent metrics for how many times a particular word or phrase is mentioned on the social web or in tweets. The thing that makes Topsy invaluable to marketers is that it provides raw counts for both social web mentions and twitter mentions. These raw counts are excellent indicators of the online buzz your brand receives. If you review these counts regularly, you will be able to begin simple correlations about which of your marketing activities are driving most buzz.
Besides being free, Google analytics has several data points that help determine how much your brand is driving traffic to your website. The number of visits your sites receives from branded keywords can help you understand how many people searched for your brand and clicked to your website. Use the keywords report and restrict the keywords to those containing your keyword.
The people who come directly to your website, either through typing in your domain name or from bookmarks are useful indicator of how many people aware of your brand and choosing to visit your website.
3- Linkedin
Linkedin has valuable metrics accessible to your company page admins. Because Linkedin is a business networking tool, you will be able to see how many people investigate your company on the business network. To view the metrics, visits your company's page on Linkedin and click Analytics. Then go to
Companies>your company>Analytics
Linkedin data is only provide monthly, making weekly comparisons difficult, but it is interesting data nonetheless.
4- Klout
Klout is an Analytics tool that measures a user's influence across their social network. Klout ascribes a standard of influence and an algorithm of an at least 35 variables using data points such as:
- Twitter followers
- Re-tweets
- List memberships
- How many spam and dead accounts are following you?
- How often you engage with other influencers
- How influential are the people you engage with
- How influential are the people who re-tweet you
- Unique mentions
This information is blended with Facebook and Linkedin data such as comments and the number of friends in your network to come up with you Klout score. In addition, Klout measures True reach, amplification and network influence.
