11 brand tracking tools for marketers (and how to use them)

How well your business is doing can be understood not only from your revenue and profit reports. To create a business that lives a long, healthy life, you’ll have to look into brand health metrics that delve into brand sentiment rather than focusing just on sales. 

Brand health isn’t an abstract concept, if you use the right tools to measure it. In fact, with the right information at your fingertips, you can even calculate the ROI of certain brand health metrics. 

In this guide, we’ll take a deep dive into brand tracking—more specifically, the software you can use to keep track of your brand. We’ll cover eleven tools and highlight what you should be looking for in a tool, so you can make a well-calculated decision.

Why use brand tracking software?

Think that by regularly checking reviews you’ve got a clear view of how your brand is being perceived? Think again. 

Brand tracking looks beyond the obvious and gives you real insights into your brand’s identity and brand reputation.

What is brand tracking software?

Before we get to the ‘why’, let’s look at the ‘what’: what is a brand tracking tool, anyway? 

A brand tracking tool is a piece of software that will help you gather information on important brand health metrics—from reputation management to brand awareness, to name only two. 

Brand tracking software shouldn’t be confused with social listening tools—these often only look at mentions and comments on social media. 

While social media monitoring tools can give you valuable insights into your brand, it doesn’t paint the full picture. For example, the things people put on social media are typically on opposite sides of the spectrum, and you miss out on the opinion of the majority in the middle. 

In fact, we’ve written an entire article on why social listening is a terrible way to measure your brand. 

It’s cheaper than hiring an agency

The question isn’t whether you should be measuring your brand—you absolutely should be!— but how. And yes, you have options!

Many businesses don’t necessarily have the human resource to constantly track their brand, and often opt for an external agency to keep an eye on their brand. But is that the way to go?

Here’s why that’s often the expensive choice: not only do agencies charge huge amounts, your brand tracking isn’t completely ‘yours’, and you have to wait for them to report back to you, which could cost you if the trick is to act fast. 

Constantly changing business trends mean that your brand strategy needs to be fluid, and you need to be ready to react quickly.  

Plus, the expertise you and your teams gain in-house is incredibly valuable in the long run. On top of that, most brand monitoring tools have flexible price plans, so you don’t pay for features you won’t be using.

Brand tracking software delivers results in real-time

Having a brand tracking software in place with neat dashboarding and reporting features means that you have instant access to real-time information on your brand. 

This means you can act in the moment. Agility and speed are key ingredients to gaining a competitive advantage.

Prevent being taken by surprise by competing brands

Using brand tracking software is like going to the dentist every six months, just for a check-up: there (probably) won’t be any unexpected and unpleasant surprises if you keep an eye on your brand health. 

The right tracker will put your brand health metrics in perspective by looking at the entire market and make sure you won’t miss any early warning signs.

What should you look for in brand monitoring tools?

Brand monitoring tools are one of the aspects in life where it is totally okay—advised even—to show up with a list of wishes and demands. After all, it’s a pretty big investment, and it can make or break your brand and success. 

Here’s what we’d be looking for if we ourselves were browsing for a brand tracking tool.

Look for more than a social mention tool

There are lots of tools out there that market themselves as brand tracking tools, while only keeping track of social media mentions and offering you a social media management tool. 

These are important too, but social media listening is a separate and limited part of brand tracking. If you’re looking for a more comprehensive tool, search for something that will actually allow you to talk to a thorough and representative group of consumers. 

Finding out what people say about your brand on social media is only part of the story—for the full picture you need to find out why they said the things they said on social media platforms.

Look for a tool that allows you to track recurrently

Brand tracking shouldn’t be done once in a blue moon. 

Make sure you go for a tool that allows you to track more frequently—maybe several times a year—and best shows how metrics are evolving over time.

Look for a tool that comes with real experts 

Chances are you’ll have some questions when using your brand-new brand tracking tool. 

While an FAQ page is great, sometimes you just want to get expert guidance from a real person who knows brand monitoring and market research inside out. 

We advise you to go for a tool that comes with human experts that you can reach out to perfect your brand tracking skills.

Look for a tool that helps to gather a really relevant audience

You could have the fanciest tool with the most dazzling features, but if the audience it works with is not relevant to your business, there’s really no point. 

Look into how the tool you have your eye on gathers its audience and find out if it is suitable for your business.

Look for a tool that measures all the metrics that matter to you

Some brand trackers specialize in specific brand health metrics. Some are pros in reputation management, others in brand awareness. 

Find out what metrics you want to measure first, and then start looking for a tool that covers that.

Look for a tool that also allows you to track competitors

Tracking your own brand is vital, but your own brand health metrics don’t mean much if you don’t also keep an eye on your competitors. 

A competitive analysis and competitor monitoring should always be a part of your brand monitoring and market research. 

11 best brand tracking tools

Time to get to the tools! We’ll break down 11 brand monitoring tools based on their key features and of course their pricing. 

1. Attest

Unsurprisingly, we’re kicking off the list with our own brand tracking tool. 

Our brand tracking software helps marketers and companies to better understand how their brand is performing, in several fields. How do we do that?

For starters, with brand tracker survey templates that you can customize to fit your needs. Happy with the survey you created? Then it’s time to send it to your target group, which we’re sure you’ll find in the 125 million consumers across 58 markets we give you access to. This will give you hyper relevant high-quality insights in no-time. 

Attest key features

• Access to a huge audience makes it easy to talk to your real target audience
• Get actionable insights in no-time
• Intuitive survey builder
• Access to a team of experts that will help you up your survey skills

Attest pricing

Your first survey is on us! After that, the plans start at $0.50 per response for up to 50,000 responses, including a dedicated research expert to support your needs.

2. Suzy

Suzy offers a brand tracker that focuses on the US market and has 50K monthly active users. Suzy uses some brand research methods that are more suitable to experienced researchers—but their interface is easy to use for anyone.  

One great feature is their competitive analysis tool, which makes for a great addition to any market research and sets you up for success.

How much does Suzy cost?

Suzy doesn’t mention any pricing on their website, so book a demo for more info. Keep in mind that Suzy does charge for onboarding and access costs extra for every user who wants to use the platform.

3. Latana

Latana describes their platform as ‘AI-Powered Brand Tracking’, so if you’re only looking for a platform to tell you how your brand is performing, they’re worth a look. 

Theirs is a mobile-first platform and they claim to be able to reach over 4 billion mobile users in more than 100 countries. And they follow up the brand monitoring with analytics that they say is powered by AI.  

Because they focus on brand tracking, their platform perhaps isn’t quite right for you if you’re looking for a greater picture of your ideal customers. 

In addition to knowing what consumers think about your brand, you might need to know how they think, act and buy, and how this impacts everything from your marketing strategy to your new product development and sales processes. In which case a tool that caters to a more comprehensive level of market research would be ideal for you.

Latana key features

• Brand tracking tool
• Customizable insights 
• Flexible segmentation

Latana pricing

Latana doesn’t reveal its pricing until you’ve filled in a form telling them what kind of brand tracking you want to do. 

4. Google Trends

Looking for a great—free—tool to track how people are searching for your brand and industry? 

There’s always Google Trends! 

With this simple tool you can compare your brand’s name to any other keywords (like competitors’ names), or track how much it has been mentioned over time to identify event-triggered spikes in keyword search volume. 

Combining this with Google Analytics and Google Alerts gives even more context to the information.

Google Trends key features

• Comparative keyword research
• Get geographical information about who’s searching for your brand
• See brand mentions over time

Google trends pricing

All the mentioned Google tools are free to use!

5. Brandwatch

Brandwatch helps you monitor mentions of your brand online and on social media, but adds key trends around your business and industry to this for more context. 

The tool even lets you conduct multi-year brand monitoring studies to uncover trends in your brand awareness over time—useful when you’re crafting your brand identity. 

Brandwatch key features:

• Keyword tracking
• Social measurement 
• Sentiment analysis 
• Competitor analysis

Brandwatch pricing

Brandwatch doesn’t mention any prices or plans on their website, so reach out to their sales team for a custom quote.

6. SEMrush

You might know SEMrush for its SEO tools, but it can also be a brand monitoring tool. 

In their Brand Monitoring Dashboard, you can keep a close eye on how well your brand is performing when it comes to mentions and backlinks. You can analyze what people are saying about your brand online and where, getting first-hand data from consumers about your brand.

Semrush key features

• Identify mention sentiment and even analyze mentioning resource authority
• Enables you to also analyze competitors’ brands 
• Make trends and tracked words visual in a graph

SEMrush pricing

The brand monitoring feature is part of their content marketing platform, which is only available in the Guru and Business plans, respectively for $229.95 or $449.95 a month. 

7. Ahrefs

Another SEO superhero is Ahrefs, which also comes with some great tools for brand monitoring—if only you know what to look out for. 

You can analyze your competitors while also keeping an eye on what customers are searching for and saying about you, plus tracking your ranking progress over time, to match the mentions with the results.

Ahrefs key features

• Ahrefs comes with a whole lot of SEO tools that are easy to use but bring highly relevant insights
• Automatically keep track of what people are saying about your brand or relevant keywords 
• Monitor not only your own rankings but also chart your performance against your competitors

Ahrefs pricing

The Ahrefs Lite plan starts at $99, going up to $179 for the Standard plan, $399 for Advanced and $799 for their Enterprise plan.

8. BuzzSumo

Brand monitoring with BuzzSumo allows you to check your own brand mentions, and those of your competitors. On top of that you get industry updates to put all of it in the big picture.

BuzzSumo key features

• Get insights into what people are saying about products in your category
• Track your own brand mentions and those of competitors
• Get relevant updates about what’s happening in your industry

BuzzSumo pricing

There’s a limited free plan, but the Pro plan starts at only $79 a month if you pay yearly, going up to a Plus plan for $139 and Large for $239 when billed yearly. 

9. NetBase Quid

Your brand health is constantly evolving, and getting a clear picture on trends in this is key. NetBase Quid lets you do just that, with brand tracking that also lets you analyze with the context of historical benchmarks. 

A neat extra feature is that NetBase Quid also uses AI to identify when your brand is used in pictures, for more contextualized social tracking.

NetBase Quid key features

• Historical benchmarks to see how your brand grows over time
• Analysis of brand sentiment to make sense of mentions
• Competitor analysis to compare your brand’s health to others

NetBase Quid pricing

NetBase Quid doesn’t mention any prices or plans on their website, so reach out to their sales team for more information.

10. Blue Ocean brand navigator

Blue Ocean’s brand navigator uses the power and speed of smart algorithms to not only analyze your current brand health, but also has predictive features—to stay ahead of the competition. 

Their brand navigator uses three types of data: audience signal, marketing content and business and financial content, giving you the full picture. 

Blue Ocean brand navigator key features

• A mix of Artificial Intelligence and human expertise
• Works with a sophisticated list of datasets and business metrics
• Get recommendations for your business based on your data

Blue Ocean brand navigator pricing

The Blue Ocean brand navigator has a custom price plan based on your needs, so reach out to their sales team to find out more.

11. Awario

Don’t wanna miss a thing? Then Awario could be the brand monitoring tool to go for. 

It focuses on social listening and other mentions on the web, so it is limited but it’s very thorough with the listening. They don’t rely on a single third-party data provider, but instead crawl over 13 billion web pages daily, in addition to APIs. 

Add its competitive brand monitoring skills to that, and you are well underway to measure your brand’s online reputation. 

Awario key features

• Sentiment analysis to see how people feel about your brand
• Location-based monitoring for business who target local audiences
• Social media monitoring, so you don’t have to keep an eye on it yourself
• Boolean search for hyper-focused searches 

Awario pricing 

Awario plans start at €24 per month. Looking to add more keywords and members to that? Go pro for €74 or go all in with the Enterprise plan for €249.

Tips for using brand tracking software

So, you’ve found a tool that seems to tick all the boxes. Now what? Here are some extra tips to get the most out of your brand-new brand tracking software.

Tip 1: Use it consistently

Tracking is not something you do only once. Make the tool an essential part of your workflows—from designing and evaluating marketing campaigns to doing research for a new product launch. 

These tools shouldn’t be something extra in your toolbox, but should be used to lay a solid foundation for your business and brand decisions.

Tip 2: Choose your metrics carefully

Depending on your current goals, different brand health metrics are important to you at the moment. Define which ones those are first, before choosing a fancy tool. 

You don’t want to be losing time and money with a tool that just doesn’t cut it and needs additional research on top of that to get the full picture. 

Wondering what metrics you should be looking at for your brand tracking? Here’s our video guide on how to measure your brand health.

Tip 3: Make the most of expert support 

If you have chosen a brand monitoring tool that has real experts ready to give you research guidance (like Attest!), use them! These types of tools are often ever-evolving and people who work with them directly know them inside out and can add extra value to the tool. 

Tip 4: Evaluate regularly

Is your brand tracking software serving you right year after year? Just because you chose it once, doesn’t mean it remains the right choice. Regularly check in with the people using the data from the tools to see if there are any gaps that need to be filled with other or alternative tools. 

Tip 5: Make results accessible to everyone who needs it

Think your sales reps or customer service team have no business knowing the details of your brand health metrics? Think again: they’re the ones working on the forefront who are directly influencing these metrics, from reputation to reviews. 

By giving them access to this knowledge you show them directly how their actions impact the success of the business and you can inspire them to do better. Better yet, build incentives in to motivate them to up their game when it comes to brand-related action!

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