Purchase Funnel Metrics: From Awareness to Loyalty

Why the Funnel Matters for Brand Health

The traditional marketing funnel tracks the decision points consumers go through before and after they buy, and the health of your brand depends on how it performs at each one. Tracking purchase funnel metrics over time shows you where a brand is strong and where it's losing consumers, so you know what to fix. The four decision points are awareness, consideration, purchase, and repeat purchase or loyalty.

The funnel has been around a long time for a good reason. It maps how consumers actually decide, and a weak point at any stage can pull down overall brand health. It's kind of like going to the doctor for your annual physical and looking at all the different measures of your health. If any one of them is off, it's time to address it. Let's take a look at each stage, and then at how to track them.

Awareness: Do Enough People Know You?

Awareness measures how many people know your product exists, and a brand needs enough of them to deliver the sales volume it's after. The funnel narrows at every stage, so a wide top is what leaves enough consumers at the bottom.

Awareness comes from visibility on shelf, advertising, social media, word of mouth, and more. For large, iconic brands like Amazon, Apple, or Heinz, awareness is very high because it's hard not to have heard of them. Smaller brands that are just starting out, or that fill a narrow niche, will have much lower awareness.

The number itself, high or low, matters less than how it changes over time and how high it is among your target consumers. Every brand needs to decide what its target should be.

Awareness is also two separate numbers. Top-of-mind awareness is being able to recall a brand without any prompting. Think of brands that make cell phones. You probably thought of the iPhone or Samsung, among others. Given the category, you came up with brands on your own. Prompted, or overall, awareness is when you're given a brand name and asked if you recognize it. That's especially helpful for smaller brands that may not readily come to mind without a prompt. Both numbers are worth tracking so you can maintain or grow them, depending on your business goals.

Consideration: Are They Thinking of You as an Option?

Consideration is whether a consumer who knows your brand actually thinks of it as an option to buy. Awareness gets you noticed. Consideration is what happens when the consumer starts to evaluate.

Say someone is standing in front of the pasta sauce aisle. They may already be aware of a brand, or they may notice it for the first time. Then they pick up the jar, look at the ingredients, check the price, and start weighing it against the others. That's consideration.

Brands can lose consumers at that point. A brand might seem interesting at first glance, but when a consumer looks closer, it doesn't meet their needs or it’s not what they thought it was. So, it's important to know if you're losing consumers here and, if so, why. And like awareness, consideration needs to be tracked over time to make sure it isn't going down.

Purchase: Are They Buying?

Purchase is when a consumer who has become aware of your brand and considers it actually buys it, either because it meets all of their needs or because something about it looked interesting enough to try.

This is the stage that shows up in your sales data. As covered in the previous post, Leading and Lagging Indicators of Brand Health: Act Early, that makes purchase a lagging indicator. By this point, there were two earlier places to check whether the brand might be in decline: awareness and consideration. Both can be tracked over time, so you can catch changes before they have a large impact on your sales.

Loyalty: Are They Coming Back?

Loyalty is the last stop in the funnel. It measures repeat purchase and how long that repeat lasts, so it shows whether consumers keep buying your brand or switch around.

Loyalty is also a leading indicator of brand health, as covered in Leading and Lagging Indicators of Brand Health: Act Early. Consumers show loyalty in more than one way, from true brand loyalists to occasional switchers.

How to Track Purchase Funnel Metrics

Purchase funnel metrics are shown as percentages, with each stage measured against the one before it. Start with the percent of people, among the total population or within your target group, who are aware of your brand. Of those, what percent consider it? Of those who consider it, what percent buy it? And of those who buy, what percent repeat? You may start with a high number, but by the end the number will be much smaller as there is no brand that has 100% go through each stage.

Awareness and consideration can only be tracked through a consumer survey. Plenty of vendors do this, and you can run it as often as once a month or as little as once a year. The right timing depends on your business goals, the marketing you have in place, and your starting point. A new brand might run it more often during introduction to see how awareness is ramping up. A larger, more stable brand might run it once a year, because anything more frequent wouldn't pick up changes.

You can track purchase and loyalty through a survey too, but a better way is syndicated data from a source like Circana or NielsenIQ. Those companies collect actual purchase data, so you aren't relying on consumers to remember what they bought and how often.

That said, because you're looking at percentages, getting the full funnel usually takes a survey, so you see each stage among the same group of people. That gives you the best view of the funnel in its entirety. You can always look at penetration (purchase) and repeat separately, which still gives you an indication of brand health on their own.

Finding the Weak Points in Your Funnel

Knowing the funnel for your brand, and tracking it over time, shows you which areas to press harder on and which ones need fixing. A drop at any one stage is a signal to find out why before it spreads to the stages below it.