“Of course the first thing to do was to make a grand survey of the country she was going to travel through. ‘It’s something very much like learning geography,’ thought Alice, as she stood on tiptoe in hopes of being able to see a little further.”
There is something deeply recognizable in that image from Lewis Carroll’s “Through the Looking Glass” for any brand or marketing manager at an institution of higher education. The idea of gaining an advantage if you could only see what’s ahead — to get a sense of your place in the market — would be a compelling undertaking for any brand manager.
There’s strong evidence linking brand equity to brand growth. However, the gap between where you are, where you are going and how to navigate what you find and make directional is anything but easy to forge.
If we could only see a little further…
This is a struggle across many marketing leaders. According to the World Federation of Advertisers’ global marketing effectiveness survey — one of the largest client-side studies of its kind, drawing on 310 companies across 20 national advertiser associations — 71% of marketers agree that long-term brand effects are crucial to organizational success. But only 59% say they have meaningful metrics to actually measure those effects. Our industry’s own SimpsonScarborough CMO Study indicated only 51% report having measures in place to track brand strength over time.
The standard instrument for closing that gap is a formal brand tracker — a longitudinal study that measures aided and unaided awareness, consideration, and perception shifts among prospective students across target markets over time. Done well, it is genuinely illuminating.
Context for Brand Measurement
The logic behind brand tracking is intuitive and, at its core, well-supported by decades of empirical research. Brands live in minds. And the more robustly a brand occupies consumer memory — not just as a name, but as a web of associations, feelings, and retrieval cues — the more likely it is to be chosen.
Brand measurement should establish a continuous read on aided and unaided awareness, consideration, perception shifts, and competitive standing among defined audiences. Its primary value is directional. It tells you whether your brand’s footprint is growing or shrinking in the minds of the people you most need to reach, and it gives you enough consistency of measurement to connect your marketing investment to movement in those indicators.
Connecting Brand Measurement to Brand and Business Outcomes
Research consistently shows that brand health metrics are leading indicators of business outcomes — predictive of revenue growth, customer loyalty, and competitive resilience. The richer the web of memory structures a brand builds, the more likely it is to surface at the moment of choice.
In practice, that means tracking the things that reflect the breadth and depth of that presence — measures like unaided and aided awareness, familiarity, favorability, consideration, perceived quality, reputation, and likelihood to recommend. Together, these indicators tell you not just whether people know your brand, but whether it means something to them and whether it’s in the running when decisions get made. If brand measurement allows marketers to better predict business outcomes, what’s stopping all marketers from running these studies?
Cost-Effective Leading Measures
The barrier for marketers can be cost. Either in total, or to maintain the desired frequency. But cost is not the only path to directional brand intelligence. There are complementary and, in some cases, lower-cost approaches that can extend the signal.
| Proxy Metric | What It Measures | Where to Find It | Cadence | What to Watch |
| Branded search volume | Unaided demand; how often people search your institution name without a paid prompt | Google Search Console | Monthly | Sustained growth = rising awareness; Decline = early warning signal |
| Direct / branded traffic | Unaided awareness; people who typed your URL or searched your name to find you | Google Analytics 4 | Monthly | Growth in direct sessions as a % of total traffic signals brand recall improving |
| In-platform brand lift studies | Awareness, recall, and consideration shift among exposed vs. unexposed audiences during a campaign flight | Meta, YouTube, LinkedIn (built into campaign manager) | Per campaign | Before/after delta on awareness and consideration; benchmark across flights over time |
In-Platform Lift Studies
Brand lift studies are another accessible option for institutions running paid social or video campaigns. While not a true tracking study, it does offer insight into how an advertising campaign may affect recall, familiarity, and/or consideration. Both Meta and YouTube use controlled experiments to measure whether exposure to your advertising actually moves brand perception. The platform randomly splits your exposed audience into a test group that sees your ads and a holdout group that doesn’t. Both are then served a brief survey, and the difference in responses between groups is attributed to ad exposure. That difference is your “lift.” What platforms measure varies, but here’s a breakdown.
| Meta | YouTube | |
| Typical Cost | Minimum $120,000 (U.S.) | Based on number of questions: 1 question = $10,000, 3 questions = $60,000 |
| Timeline | 2-4 weeks | 14 days or until response threshold is met |
| Metrics Available | Ad recall, brand awareness, message association, favorability, purchase intent | Ad recall, brand awareness, consideration, favorability, purchase intent |
| Questions Allowed | 2-4 | Up to 3 |
Share of Search
One of the more compelling developments in brand measurement over the last decade is the growing body of evidence around Share of Search (SoS) as a proxy for brand health and market share. The concept is straightforward: a brand’s share of all searches within its category tends to track closely with its actual share of demand. Cross-industry validation studies have demonstrated a consistently tight relationship between Share of Search and Share of Market across CPG, automotive, restaurants, and hospitality.
What makes this useful under budget pressure is the accessibility of the inputs. Search volume data is available through tools like Google Trends, and a category-level view can be constructed without the infrastructure of a full brand tracking program.
As an example, imagine you want to track Share of Search for your institution against four direct competitors. You’d start by identifying the core branded search terms for each: institution names, common abbreviations, and any flagship program names strongly associated with each brand. Using Google Trends or a search volume tool, you pull monthly search volume for each set of terms over a rolling 12-month period.
How to Calculate:
Your Institution’s SoS = Your Branded Search Volume ÷ Total Branded Search Volume Across All Five Institutions
If your institution generates 18,000 searches per month and the combined total across all five is 90,000, your Share of Search is 20%. Tracked consistently quarter over quarter, the directional movement matters more than any single number.
While a formal brand tracker remains the gold standard, branded search volume, direct traffic trends, Share of Search, and in-platform lift studies used consistently can either act as an intermediary between formalized trackers or as a way to build toward a measurement system that becomes more robust. For Alice, she just needed to see a little further. These approaches won’t replace a full tracker, but used consistently, they give higher ed marketers something most don’t yet have: evidence that their brand is growing, shrinking, or holding ground in the minds of the audiences they’re trying to reach.
