Last week we drilled down into engagement metrics, so this week let’s take a look at awareness and reach. The reach of your brand is, essentially, a measure of the impression your brand is making online: how far it’s moved across the Web and how many eyes, ears, and mouths are seeing, hearing, and talking about it.

Now, how do you measure reach? It might seem a little fuzzy at first, but these few metrics can provide a foothold in the practice of measuring how far your brand extends — and *how* it extends — out there on the Web.

1. Potential Reach

The most basic of all awareness metrics, looking at the numbers of fans, followers, or “eyeballs” is a pretty fundamental concept. But the more accurate way to look at numbers like this is as *potential* reach, as you’ll never have all of those people paying attention to you simultaneously. Take a look at other elements like peak usage time for specific sites and marry awareness metrics with actual engagement activity to get a closer ratio of potential vs. actual reach at any one time.

2. Mentions Per Time Period

The online equivalent of “impressions”, looking simply at how many times your brand is talked about online during a given time period can give you a sense of overall awareness and chatter. It can be interesting to segment this category of data overall, too, through lenses like “mentions by media type”, to see whether blogs or forums or mainstream media are carrying the bulk of conversation about your brand. And line up this metric with your targeted campaigns or engagement efforts, and get a sense of whether your work drives those numbers up, down, or not at all.

3. Inbound Links

The web analytics standby, inbound links are a solid indicator of the people that are not only aware of you, but are telling other people that they should be aware of you, too. Want to know where in social media you should be spending your time? Look at the sites and media types where the inbound links live to get a sense of the types of media that are driving consistent attention for your brand. And to get some insight into how people refer to you and think of you, pay attention to the anchor text folks use when they create those links, and see if they’re using the terminology to describe your work that you hope they are.

4. Share of Conversation

Share of Voice is a familiar concept, looking at how much you’re mentioned or covered in comparison to, say, the competition. but Share of Conversation measures something a bit more helpful: how often you or your company are mentioned in context of the conversations that are most relevant to you. In other words, if you want to be a leading document management company, how often are folks talking about you when they’re talking about their document management needs? For a bit more detail about how to calculate and measure Share of Conversation, read Marcel Lebrun’s post.

5. Subscribers to Content

Related to potential reach, number of subscriptions can function as both an awareness and an engagement metric. Whether you’re talking email subscribers, blog subscribers, or even subscribers to your print publication, subscriptions represent conscious interest in your content and a focused group of potential reach for that media. And while you often depend on provided “reach” or impression numbers given to you by third parties for advertising placements or the like, subscribers is a number that’s directly attributable to your own content and impact.

6. Referral and Recommendation Ratio

This metric really ends up in the camp of engagement, too, as well as sales. But from an awareness point of view, it can be valuable when looking at the value of increased awareness over time, and whether that correlates with a consistent proportion of recommendations or referrals in and among the other mentions. If you can successfully increase the ratio of direct brand recommendations as an overall share of reach and awareness, you’ll better make a case for designing efforts to reach larger audiences.

7. Brand Recognition

Sometimes asking people if they know about you still works. That can be an informal straw poll on larger social networks, or a more structured survey of a broader audience through something like a market research firm. Sometimes called recall, the idea here is looking at everything from whether people can and do name your brand inside of a relevant market category, or in association with other relevant ideas or concepts. It can be an interesting broad-brush look at whether you’re present in people’s minds in the ways that matter to you.

8. Brand-Specific Searches

Take a look at your analytics traffic for your website, and see what people are typing into search when they’re referred to you. Are they searching for general industry terms, like “car repair shop in Austin”, or are they specifically searching for “Bob’s Repair Shop Austin”? Look at the ratio to brand searches vs. keyword searches and see how that ratio changes over time. Keyword searches represent a broader need, while brand-specific searches are an indicator that you’re being sought out specifically.

9. Sentiment Trends

There’s a lot of talk about sentiment and what it can or can’t tell you. What we at Radian6 chat a lot about is the value of sentiment as a trend metric, looking at the volume and ratio increase, decrease, or stagnation over a broader time period. While impressions can tell you volume of mentions, coupling them with sentiment trends can tell you whether the brand impression overall is favorable or not. Want to get really granular? Start dissecting, say, the positive sentiment segment and look at the makeup. Are they mostly compliments? Recommendations? Nice words about your staff?

10. Content Resonance

Also firmly with a foot in the engagement camp, watching how content gets shared across the web will also certainly point you toward how many people are seeing what you’re up to. Along with first level shares and spread of your content – the tweets, subscription impressions, website hits – you can also dig into the notion of secondary reach. That means looking at who in your network reshared and passed along your content: retweets, reblogs, shares, or inbound links from spinoff content. Add a time series layer to that – how long the shares and reshares continue to trickle out to the web – and you’ll start seeing the kinds of content that reverberate well.

As we talked about in the post about 10 Key Engagement Metrics to Track, single metrics on their own aren’t really worth much. The real trick is to connect the dots and tie them together so that you can see how several measurements, in tandem, point to progress toward your business goals.

So what are you tracking that indicates reach and awareness in your world? How are you using those measurements to correlate with your sales and engagement data? Would love to hear from you in the comments.