5 Considerations When Switching Brand Tracking Providers

In today’s fast-paced world, it’s critical for you to keep a finger on the pulse of your brand health, competitor performance, and industry growth. Dynamic brand insights mean keeping ahead of the market and making real-time business decisions with confidence. Having a brand tracker that can keep up with the pace of your business and its evolving needs is critical to making these decisions. So when you find that your brand tracker is not giving you the edge you need, it can mean that it’s time to switch to a new provider.

As someone who just went through the experience of switching brand tracking providers, I’d like to share 5 considerations to keep in mind while doing this.

A brief introduction to brand tracking

Brand tracking is a longitudinal study that measures brand health using key metrics that matter to a brand—from metrics along the sales funnel to brand attributes. It allows you to continuously monitor your brand and key competitors, with a focus on your brand health, its growth with consumers, and perceptions of brands in the market. It can also be used to measure brand lift from marketing campaigns, benchmark competitors, and track new categories or markets you want to invest in or enter into.

Why it might be time to change providers

Brand trackers have the potential to add a lot of value to an organization—they provide an understanding of business context and enable more confident decision-making. With the complexity and fast pace of today’s market, it becomes critical to have a brand tracker that gives you the ability to spot trends as they’re happening with up-to-the-minute brand health insights from your target consumers. And that’s why we just launched our new SurveyMonkey Brand Tracker solution, a flexible, end-to-end product that leverages high-quality data, AI insights, custom dashboards, and expert services to help you stay ahead of the market and make better decisions with data.

However, too many companies still use brand trackers that provide static insights, collecting data from a point in time and not on a continuous basis. There are many good reasons to evaluate your brand tracker from time to time and to even consider switching providers. Whether to ensure you’re tracking the right metrics and competitors, uncover more relevant insights, cut costs, or ensure your tracker is agile and flexible enough to work at the speed your business demands, your brand tracker deserves a second look, so it can give you the edge you need to grow your business.

5 considerations when switching brand tracking providers

Switching your tracker to a new vendor can be stressful but ultimately may save you time and money while allowing you to get updated insights more frequently than before. And whatever your reasons for migrating your brand tracker to a new provider, here are 5 considerations to keep in mind that will help lessen the stress:

1. Plan ahead and get stakeholder buy-in

Brand tracking studies are critical to decision-making at companies and often require a large time and money investment. When migrating your brand tracker to a new supplier, adequate planning and preparation are required. Clearly identifying which metrics to track, when and how often to track, which brands to include, and how the results can be used is a good starting point.

Getting buy-in from key stakeholders is equally important. Trackers can be used by many cross-functional teams, and getting their alignment on why it makes sense to migrate to a new supplier is key. The value a change in trackers can bring to the organization–and what it means for how teams use the tracker–is essential to ensuring adoption and credibility of the data and insights that will be generated.

2. Evaluate your sample composition

To successfully migrate your brand tracker from one research provider to the next, sample consistency is key. Changes to the respondent panel used can introduce variability into the mix and impact the quality of responses you get, resulting in inconsistent trends in the new tracker data vs. the old tracker data.

Going in with the assumption that there will be some differences between samples is fair and warrants thinking about what those differences are and how they might skew the data. Different research providers often use different panel sources or different blends of panels. Discussing with your provider can help to better understand these differences and how they might impact your data. In addition, work with your provider to consider other aspects of recruitment, such as matching incentive models.

Another watch-out is to make sure your new tracker allows the same granularity in balancing your data. For example, your old tracker may be balanced on age, gender and income, but your new tracker may not collect income data and so may not be able to balance on that variable. In such a case, examine your previous tracker sample specifications and talk to your new tracker provider about whether you might be able to include income as a screening question and balance on that, or if there are other ways to ensure sample consistency with the previous tracker sample composition.

While weighing and balancing the data can lessen the impact of sample differences, there’s still a chance that there will be some variability across trackers. However, the variability between samples isn’t always a bad thing–especially if your target audience has evolved or if the new respondent panel can reach segments the old panel was unable to–but it does mean that the new data will not be consistent with the old.

Switching to a new tracker is also a good opportunity to examine sample composition from your old tracker and re-think whether you’d like to change anything or to identify any biases you’ve noticed from your previous sample design.

3. Revisit your survey design

Survey design and setup play a big role in ensuring high-quality, usable data for any research project. These fundamentals are maybe even more important for brand tracking studies, as the same survey is fielded wave after wave to provide the longitudinal data that makes a brand tracker what it is. Since the survey is typically designed, set up, and programmed just once, at the onset, it’s critical to get it right.

I was recently part of a team that switched brand tracking providers. While transitioning our survey design, I realized that the new provider’s methodology did not show brand logos/labels while asking brand health questions, which our old provider did. This resulted in brand awareness for a very popular brand showing up as much lower in the new tracker than in the old tracker, simply because it has a very distinct and widely recognized logo that was not shown to respondents in the new tracker survey.

When trying to reduce inconsistencies between your old and new trackers, survey design and programming are probably the most important steps (apart from sample design). It is best practice to mirror the survey layout, question text, and data structure from the previous tracker to reduce variability between both tracker surveys, as that can impact the data quality and cause a messy tracker transition.

Also important to note is that any modifications to things like question text, question type, or response options can introduce more variability between your tracker surveys. However, switching to a new brand tracker does allow you the opportunity to add new custom questions to your survey.

If you choose to do so, ensure that all new questions are added to the end so that the standard key metric questions are still in the same place as in your previous survey, and responses to those are not impacted by the new questions added.

4. Calibrate both trackers

Calibrating your new tracker to the old one is the final “review” step before you completely transition to the new tracker. What this simply means is running both trackers, old and new, in parallel for at least a few months or waves and comparing rankings of metrics to see how well things align across both trackers. This provides some time to observe and investigate data trends across both trackers and iron out any irregularities or variance seen on the back end.

Calibrating both trackers also helps you set baselines for your new tracker while still giving you the safety net of your old tracker.

Let’s say you switch vendors without calibrating both trackers, and you see a significant dip in results in your new tracker. Without being able to compare to the old tracker, it would be really hard to know if the dip was due to an actual change in market conditions, or if it was just due to the change in vendor, and consequently, a change in respondent source. Running both trackers in parallel can provide a check and give you confidence in the new tracker while also setting a baseline to compare to in the future.

Running both trackers in parallel is also a great time to demonstrate the benefits of the new tracker to stakeholders, get their buy-in, and get users comfortable with the new tracker before letting go of the old one.

5. Rethink what’s included

While the natural tendency is to stick with the status quo and simply duplicate all elements of your old tracker with the new provider, that means missing out on an opportunity to make improvements. Switching vendors for your tracking study is the ideal time to evaluate whether you are tracking the right metrics, need to include a new screener or survey questions, have the right brand lists and attributes and whether the tracker is being used the right way.

It’s also a great time to get feedback from users and cross-functional partners who rely on tracker data to make business decisions and to ensure they are getting the value they need from it.

Think about who is using your tracker data and for what purpose. As technology advances make their way into the research industry, provider capabilities and tracking methods continue to get better. Use this time to ask your new vendor how you can leverage all their tracking capabilities to reach your goals and power your organization to greater heights.

And that’s what I have to share today! 5 things to think about how to migrate to a better brand tracker. 5 ways to reduce the stress that comes with it. 5 ways to get more relevant and timely insights for your organization. Reach out if you’d like to learn more–I’d love to connect.

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