Brand awareness survey: questions, order, sample size and tracking

A brand awareness survey measures how many people in your market know your brand. It does that in two ways. Unaided awareness is the share who name your brand without being prompted. Aided awareness is the share who recognize it when they see it in a list. Ask the unaided question first, then the aided one, then a few follow-up questions for people who know you. Keep the wording and the audience the same every time you run it, or the numbers will not be comparable.

The core questions

1. Unaided awareness (an open text box). "When you think of [category], which brands come to mind?" SurveyMonkey's guide gives examples such as "When you think of athletic apparel, which brands come to mind?" Record the first brand each person names separately from the full list. The first name tells you who is top of mind; the full list tells you who is known at all.

2. Aided awareness (a list). Show your brand alongside the main competitors and ask which ones the person has heard of. Two details from Pew Research Center's questionnaire guidance matter here:

• In self-administered surveys, people tend to pick items near the top of a list. Pew randomizes the order of answer options so no brand always appears first. Do the same.
• A 2019 Pew study found that forced-choice questions produce more accurate answers than "select all that apply" lists, and Pew generally avoids the latter. Asking "Have you heard of [brand]?" with a yes or no for each brand is the safer format, even though it takes a little longer.

Consider adding one made-up brand name to the list. The share of people who claim to recognize it gives you a rough sense of how much overclaiming to expect.

3. Follow-up questions for people who know you. Keep these few. Useful ones are how familiar they are with the brand, whether they would consider it the next time they buy in the category, whether they have bought it, and where they heard of it.

Ask the questions in the right order

Order changes the answers. Pew found that when closed-ended questions on a topic come before an open-ended one, respondents are much more likely to mention the ideas raised in those earlier questions. If people see your brand in the aided list first, more of them will "recall" it afterwards.

So the unaided question always comes first. Also keep your brand out of everything people see before it: the survey title, the introduction, the screening questions and, where possible, the sender name on the invitation.

Who to survey and how many

Survey people who buy in your category, in the markets you sell to, not the general public. Use screening questions to reach them.

Sample size sets how precise each figure is. Pew explains that a simple random sample of 1,067 people has a margin of error of about 3 percentage points either way, and that a subgroup of about 160 people has a margin of about 8 points. By the same standard formula, 400 responses give about 4.9 points either way. Two caveats: online panels are not simple random samples, and Pew notes that weighting and other sources of error make real uncertainty larger than the formula suggests. Treat the margin as a minimum.

For a sense of cost, Pollfish lists responses from $0.95 each for a short survey, with one screening question adding $0.50. At those listed prices, 400 responses would cost about $580. Pollfish says final pricing varies with survey length and targeting.

Track change the right way

A single awareness number is hard to interpret. The value comes from repeating the survey, and that only works if you keep the same wording, question order and audience definition each time, which is also how Pew measures change over time.

Be careful reading small movements. In another Pew explainer, the margin of error for a change between two polls is much larger than the margin for each poll: in its example, a 3-point shift carried a margin of about 8 points. A rise of a few points in aided awareness between two waves of 400 people may be noise. Look for a trend across several waves.

If you want to know whether a specific ad campaign moved awareness, a before-and-after survey cannot separate the campaign from everything else that happened. Google's Brand Lift instead compares survey answers from people who saw your video ads with people who were eligible but did not see them. Google says it is available only through a Google account representative.

When a survey is the wrong tool

Awareness surveys work best for consumer brands with large markets. If your buyers are a small professional group, such as IT directors at regional hospitals, a panel may not reach enough of them for a reliable percentage.

In that case, ten conversations with people in the role will tell you whether they have heard of you, which competitors they think of first and where they learn about new vendors. Interviews versus surveys explains how to choose between the two methods.

Instant Expert finds people who match a description you write, such as "IT directors at regional hospitals who have chosen a new software vendor in the last two years." You review the people it finds, it sends your invitations and you pay only for calls that get booked. See the directory page for information technology professionals in hospitals for examples.