How to Measure Brand Trust: 8 Essential Credibility Metrics

In an age where options are abundant and information is easily accessible, customers are increasingly drawn to the brands they trust.

But establishing brand trust goes beyond just meeting expectations—it’s about building credibility over time, ultimately helping you build long-term customer loyalty and advocacy. 

This guide covers eight key credibility metrics for measuring brand trust and how to track them effectively. By understanding these metrics, you can build upon your existing marketing strategies, strengthen customer relationships, and build a brand that stands out in today’s saturated market.

1. Customer Satisfaction & NPS (Net Promoter Score)

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) measures how happy a customer is with a product or service. A high CSAT score indicates that customers are satisfied with your services, products, and interactions.

Good CSAT scores typically fall between 75% and 85%, depending on the industry. E-commerce businesses have an average CSAT score of 80%, while the software industry has an average CSAT score of 78%.

Here’s how to measure CSAT:

1. Ask customers to rate their satisfaction with your brand’s services or products on a scale of 1 to 5.
2. Divide the number of satisfied responses (rated 4 or 5) by the total number of responses.
3. Multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage score. The higher the percentage, the more satisfied your customers are.

Net promoter score (NPS) measures customers' loyalty and likelihood of recommending your brand to others. A high NPS score is linked to a higher chance of customer retention, referrals, and ultimately, increased growth and earnings.

A good NPS depends on the industry. However, most industries follow these benchmarks:

• -100 to 0: Needs improvement
• 0 to 30: Good
• 30 to 70: Great
• 70 to 100: Excellent

Follow these steps to measure NPS:

1. Use an email, in-app, or in-person questionnaire to ask customers how likely they are to recommend your brand on a scale of 0 to 10.
2. Categorize customers as promoters (for those who rated your brand 9 or 10), passives (for those who rated your brand 7 or 8), or detractors (for those who rated your brand 0 to 6).
3. Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

Although CSAT and NPS both measure customer experience, they are distinct.

CSAT reflects customers’ immediate satisfaction with specific interactions. Tracking CSAT can reveal weak points in customer experience. 

For example, if customers always rate a particular service poorly, you may need to improve it. Consistently high CSAT scores foster long-term trust, increasing the likelihood of high NPS scores and long-term brand loyalty and advocacy.

NPS measures long-term customer loyalty and brand advocacy. Use it to track customer feelings about your brand over a longer period.

Ultimately, CSAT and NPS are both essential for building and maintaining brand trust. You should analyze both data sets to see how short-term satisfaction affects long-term loyalty and identify areas for improvement.

2. Customer Reviews & Ratings

Customer reviews and ratings are customers’ public sentiment toward your brand as expressed through online reviews.

You can track them through Google Business reviews, Trustpilot, Yelp, and industry-specific review websites. These platforms let consumers post public reviews about your brand and their experiences with it.

Customer reviews and ratings matter for several reasons. They:

• Act as your brand’s public face: The higher your ratings and the more favorable your reviews, the more leads will trust your brand and purchase your products and services.
• Provide valuable feedback: Reviews show what customers like and dislike about your products and services. Use these insights to make improvements and boost customer satisfaction.
• Improve search engine optimization (SEO): Search engines place businesses with positive reviews higher on search engine results pages (SERPs) because they see glowing reviews as signs of a trustworthy and reputable company.
• Can show customer engagement: Responding quickly to both negative and positive reviews demonstrates that you’re listening to customers and actively building relationships with them.

In addition to providing you with valuable information about how your brand is perceived, reviews platforms help potential customers find and learn more about your business. Clutch, for instance, is the industry leader in B2B ratings and reviews because they focus on collecting verified and detailed reviews from actual clients. 

By building out your Clutch profile and collecting positive reviews, you can signal to potential clients that you can provide consistent and high-quality services, helping build brand trust. 

Additional reading: ‘Why Reviews Are Important for Business Success.'

3. Brand Sentiment Analysis

Brand sentiment analysis evaluates people's overall positive, neutral, or negative opinions about your brand. This type of analysis is usually done using online data like reviews, social media, and customer feedback.

Follow these steps to perform brand sentiment analysis:

• Data collection: Gather text data about your brand from different sources, including online forums, social media, and customer reviews.
• Data processing: Clean and prepare the data for analysis. This could involve standardizing the data and removing irrelevant data.
• Sentiment analysis: Use software to determine the sentiment — neutral, positive, or negative — expressed in the text.
• Data visualization: Present the results in an easy-to-understand format, such as through dashboards, graphs, or charts.

Various social listening tools — including Brandwatch, Hootsuite Insights, and Sprout Social — can be used for brand sentiment analysis. These programs monitor online conversations and track brand mentions, relevant mentions, and keywords across websites and social media platforms.

Brand sentiment analysis is important for several reasons:

• Helps you understand the opinions people have about your brand: Sentiment analysis goes beyond showing you positive and negative comments. It analyzes the underlying opinions and emotions expressed about a brand. This makes it easier to identify trust issues and areas for improvement, even when you have relatively few negative reviews.
• Prompts proactive issue and online reputation management: Brand sentiment analysis shows where customers give you negative feedback. You can use this information to proactively manage your online reputation and address negative feedback effectively and efficiently.
• Identifies trends: Brand sentiment analysis helps identify trends by revealing hot topics, shifts in consumer behavior, and unmet needs. You can use this information to proactively anticipate and adapt to changing market dynamics.

4. Customer Retention & Churn Rate

The customer retention rate (CRR) is the percentage of customers who continue to use your products and services. The higher the CRR, the more satisfied and loyal your customers are.

A good CRR depends on the industry, but usually falls between 70% and 90%. Here are some monthly industry benchmarks for CRR:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS): 85 to 90% or above
• Subscription services: 75% to 90%
• Retail: 50% to 70%, depending on the business
• B2B companies with long-term contracts: 90% or higher

The churn rate is the percentage of customers who stop using your products and services in a given period. A high churn rate suggests customers are dissatisfied and may lose interest in your brand due to product or service issues.

As you might expect, a good churn rate depends on the business model, industry, and your specific goals. For the SaaS industry, an ideal churn rate is around 1% monthly and under 5% annually.

You can track CRR and churn rates by measuring the number of subscription renewals and repeat purchases. To measure churn rates, you can calculate churn analytics, which involves analyzing customer data to understand why they’ve stopped using a service product within a certain timeframe.

Customer retention and churn rate are important because they show customers' loyalty to your brand. Higher loyalty means stronger brand trust, which in turn means higher revenue, profitability, and long-term success.

By comparing customer retention and churn rates year over year, you can identify potential areas for improvement.

5. Referral & Word-of-Mouth Metrics

Referral and word-of-mouth metrics measure the number of new customers acquired through referrals. High referral rates depend on the industry but usually range from 10% to 40%.

You can track these metrics through direct customer surveys and referral program analytics. These data points measure the effectiveness and performance of a referral marketing program.

High referral rates show strong brand credibility. Brands with high credibility are more likely to be trusted by consumers, which leads to stronger brand loyalty, more referrals, and increased customer retention.

6. Media & Public Relations (PR) Mentions

Media and public relations (PR) mentions refer to the volume and sentiment of press coverage and influencer mentions.

You can track these mentions through PR monitoring tools like Brand24 and Agility PR Solutions, Google Alerts, and social media tracking platforms like Sprout Social and Hootsuite.

These metrics matter because a positive media presence builds credibility with audiences. Customers are more likely to purchase products and services from credible companies, leading to higher customer retention rates and a higher bottom line.

7. Website Trust Signals (SSL, Certifications, Endorsements)

Website trust signals are technical and visual elements showing users that a website is reliable and trustworthy.

One of the most popular website trust signals is secure sockets layer (SSL), a networking protocol that encrypts data transmitted between a client and a web server. SSL secures client and server communication, protecting sensitive data like credit card numbers from being stolen by unauthorized third parties.

Certifications and endorsements can also reassure visitors about your site’s credibility and security when entering personal data or purchasing goods and services. Examples include:

• The Norton Secured seal indicates that the site owner has taken measures to ensure site security and safety through SSL certifications. You can get this seal by buying and installing a Symantec SSL certificate.
• TrustedSite certifications demonstrate that your business meets certain business practice, security, and customer experience criteria. Examples of certifications include Verified Business, Certified Secure, Issue-Free Orders, Shopper Identity Protection, and Spam-Free.
• The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Compliance badge shows that a brand has met the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC) security standards for handling cardholder data.
• Clutch Verified businesses have gone through a rigorous vetting process to demonstrate they are trustworthy partners. To qualify, businesses must complete a credit check and have at least a 3-star rating on Clutch. 

You can track website trust signals by checking for security certificates, trust badges, and partnerships. Consider centralizing this information on a spreadsheet to keep track of your certifications.

The more trust signals you have, the more trust customers will have in online transactions with your brand.

8. Engagement & Brand Advocacy on Social Media

Engagement and brand advocacy on social media is how often consumers interact positively with your brand on social media platforms.

You can track this metric by looking at shares, comments, brand mentions, and user-generated content (UGC). If you have multiple websites and social media platforms and don’t have the time or energy to track social media activity manually, consider using Hootsuite and other social media tracking platforms.

Engagement and brand advocacy are important because they indicate whether you have a strong brand affinity — whether customers have a positive emotional connection with your brand. 

Maintaining a strong brand affinity over the long term leads to increased brand loyalty and advocacy.

Strong Credibility Metrics Keep Your Brand Focused on Trust

Knowing how customers see your brand is crucial to attracting and retaining leads as the digital marketplace becomes increasingly competitive.

That’s why you must continuously track credibility metrics like customer satisfaction and net promoter score. This helps strengthen brand loyalty, enhance customer advocacy, and make your business stand out in a crowded market. 

About the Author

Hannah Hicklen Content Marketing Manager at Clutch

Hannah Hicklen is a content marketing manager who focuses on creating newsworthy content around tech services, such as software and web development, AI, and cybersecurity. With a background in SEO and editorial content, she now specializes in creating multi-channel marketing strategies that drive engagement, build brand authority, and generate high-quality leads. Hannah leverages data-driven insights and industry trends to craft compelling narratives that resonate with technical and non-technical audiences alike. 

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