Tracking programs have been the basics for marketing teams for decades. Brand tracking serves as an essential ingredient to assess and understand shifts in brand KPIs and consumer attitudes and behaviors.

Brand tracking studies have been conducted through panel data and were once popular with marketers and worth the small fortune they cost to run, so why are they not trusted?

There are several reasons most current tracking programs fall short:

• Trackers gather only quantitative input and don't ask questions to get to the "why." Asking "why" on a regular basis can tell you where your market, competitors, and consumers are going, yet it's seldom done.

• No proven correlation between survey data and bottom line (market share, sales etc.)

• People don’t want to answer to surveys “For years, we’ve used response rate as the gold standard of survey quality. We’ve seen the response rates decline on major surveys—in some major federal surveys from 70% to 40% or less—over the last 20 years. The 2018 Survey of Medicaid in Ohio had a response rate of just 12%. (source ICF)

• Expensive, meaning that not every brand can be tracked

Share of Search analysis:

• Correlates to market share (on average 83%)

• Almost free

• “Everyone “searches once and a while. The Internet penetration is higher than electricity

• It’s predictive

To summarize:

Share of Search analysis vs Panel data:

My Telescope uses data on what people search for and not what they think they might need when asked.

As the advertising guru David Ogilvy once said, ” Consumers don’t think how they feel. They don’t say what they think, and they don’t do what they say.”