When people talk about building a brand, they usually think about logos, design, or maybe a polished About page. In reality
a brand is closer to a company's personality, alof of the best small brands are usually just fantastic to deal with because the founder focuses on keeping customers happy.
Your brand lives in the minds of your customers as a sort of impression. I
Brand tracking software has become a cornerstone of successful companies. It really doesn't matter what your brand but fast resolution or responses, catching early issues or brand mentions
can really improve or cement a customers good feeling. The adverse is true too. Hence brand management is key
In this post we’ll cover:
- Why you need a brand health tracker
- How tools like Latana and Tracksuit brand tracking work
- The role of brand tracking agencies and brand tracking research
- How to catch brand mentions, unlinked brand mentions, and brand mentions for SEO
- How free tools like F5Bot and GummySearch + webhooks + EchoDash can give you real-time visibility in one place.
Your product, pricing, and ads can all be on point, but if your reputation slips, your growth flatlines.
A bad review on a subreddit, a negative article ranking on page one, or a X thread going viral can do damage.
Brand tracking software exists to prevent blind spots. Instead of finding out too late, you’ll know instantly:
- Did sentiment dip after a new feature launch or product?
- Is a competitor eating into your awareness? (A la the fantastic DHL campaign, if you don't know it look about DHL Gorilla Marketing Campaign)
- Are there unlinked brand mentions out there you could turn into SEO juice?
- Do your customers even remember your name when surveyed?
A solid brand health tracker doesn’t just tell you the score, it should help you actually do shit to improve.
A brand health tracker is the baseline.
- Awareness – How many people know you exist
- Consideration – How many would put you on their shortlist
- Preference – How many would pick you over competitors
- Sentiment – Positive vs negative tone in brand mentions
Unlike lighter-weight dashboards that rely mostly on digital signals, Latana is survey-driven.
They run large-scale panels across multiple demographics, geographies, and psychographic profiles, giving you a clear read on how different groups perceive your brand.
This means you can track not just “are people aware of us?” but also which people are aware of you,
and whether they’re moving from awareness into consideration or preference. For example, you might discover your awareness among 18–24-year-olds is climbing fast,
but your preference scores are lagging with 35–44-year-olds.
One of Latana’s strengths is the ability to benchmark against competitors.
You can see if a rival’s campaign is shifting market sentiment in their favor, and respond accordingly.
Compared to brand tracking agencies, Latana’s advantage is speed and repeatability—surveys run continuously, not just quarterly.
The tradeoff? It’s more structured and quantitative, which can feel slower to early-stage founders who want immediate chatter from forums or socials.
If you’re scaling and need confidence in statistically significant numbers, Latana is often the gold standard of brand tracking software.
Tracksuit brand tracking takes a different approach. Instead of heavy survey panels, Tracksuit is built for speed, simplicity,
and accessibility—making it a strong fit for startups, scale-ups, and marketers who want actionable insights without agency-level complexity.
Tracksuit collects survey data too, but the key difference is presentation.
You don’t get a dense 100-page PDF; you get a clear, modern dashboard that shows awareness, consideration, preference, and sentiment
in a format that’s digestible at a glance. Many users compare it to a “live health check” for your brand. That design-first
focus means teams across marketing, growth, and product can understand results instantly without needing a research background.
Another advantage is affordability. While Latana is positioned for larger budgets and enterprises, Tracksuit has tiered
pricing that makes brand tracking software accessible for smaller teams who’d otherwise avoid it. You also get benchmarking,
competitor tracking, and share-of-search features, which are crucial for early growth companies fighting to punch above their weight.
Compared to Latana, Tracksuit doesn’t always offer the same depth or sample size in brand tracking research, but
it trades detail for speed. If Latana is the high-resolution MRI scan,Tracksuit is the always-on fitness tracker.
Both are useful—but for different contexts.
| Feature / Criteria | Latana – Brand Health Tracker | Tracksuit Brand Tracking |
|---|
| Methodology | Large-scale survey panels, statistically significant samples | Survey data + lightweight dashboards |
| Focus | Deep brand tracking research, demographic & psychographic segmentation | Accessible dashboards, always-on brand tracking software |
| Reporting Style | Detailed quantitative reports, suited for strategy & investor decks | Clean visual dashboards, suited for marketing teams & founders |
| Speed | Continuous but data-heavy (slower to update vs signals) | Fast, lightweight updates, more agile |
| Use Case | Scale-ups, enterprises, or teams needing statistically robust insights | Startups, growth teams, agencies needing fast visibility |
| Competitive Benchmarking | Strong, with demographic and regional breakdowns | Solid, includes share-of-search and category tracking |
| Cost | Higher, more enterprise-level pricing | More affordable, startup-friendly tiers |
| Strengths | Precision, rigor, credibility with boards/investors | Speed, simplicity, accessibility |
| Weaknesses | Heavier, slower, requires budget | Less depth, smaller sample sizes |
Here’s where most marketers miss the goldmine.
Google has become increasingly good at understanding brand mentions for SEO.
Even when a site doesn’t link to you, an unlinked brand mention still acts as a trust signal.
- Unlinked brand mentions show authority even without backlinks
- Outreach turns them into backlinks, boosting domain rating
- They compound: the more people talk about you, the easier it is to rank
If you’re looking for a free, lightweight way to monitor brand mentions, Google Alerts is the easiest place to start.
Simply head to Google Alerts, enter your brand name (and variations or misspellings),
and set how often you want to be notified—immediately, daily, or weekly. You’ll then receive emails whenever Google
indexes new content that includes your brand.
It’s not as comprehensive as other tools referenced below, but it’s a great baseline tool.
Google Alerts can also help you find unlinked brand mentions quickly, especially on smaller blogs and news sites.
Ahrefs is one of the most powerful ways to track brand mentions for SEO across the wider web.
Ahrefs has a feature called Alerts that lets you set up notifications whenever your brand name (or any keyword) is mentioned on a new page that enters its index.
This is especially useful for finding unlinked brand mentions on blogs, media sites, and articles.
- Broad coverage: Picks up mentions from blogs, news sites.
- SEO-first focus: Helps you identify whether a mention includes a backlink or not—critical for brand mentions for SEO strategies.
- Unlinked brand mentions: Spot opportunities to reach out to authors and ask for a link. Turning a mention into a backlink is one of the easiest and highest-ROI SEO plays.
- Competitor monitoring: You can set up alerts for competitor names too, seeing where they’re getting attention and links.
- Log into Ahrefs and navigate to Alerts.
- Click + New Alert and choose Mentions.
- Enter your brand name (and variations, e.g., “Echodash,” “Echo Dash”).
- Select your alert settings:
- Scope: Entire web (best for comprehensive brand tracking research).
- Language: Choose English or expand if you want global coverage.
- Frequency: Daily or weekly summaries.
- Add your email to receive updates.
Now every time a new article or blog post mentions your brand, you’ll get notified.
When Ahrefs sends you an alert, check if the page links to your site:
- If it already links → great, track it in your SEO tool.
- If it’s an unlinked brand mention → reach out with a polite email:
“Thanks for mentioning us in your piece. Would you mind adding a link so your readers can find us directly?” You can offer a UTM code and some kind of referral to sweeten the pot too.
This simple process helps you find unlinked brand mentions and convert them into backlinks—boosting both authority and search rankings.
Let’s look at the stack you can build today.
A free tool that monitors Reddit, Hacker News, and blogs.
It’s especially good for catching organic brand mentions in communities where customers are brutally honest.
You set alerts for keywords and get emails from f5. That easy, if you want to level up send them to EchoDash so you can combine with other
Brand Mentions.
More niche-focused. You can track subreddits and keywords tied to your market.
Perfect for early validation and ongoing brand tracking research.
Here’s where it gets powerful. Instead of getting scattered alerts by email or Slack, pipe them into EchoDash. With webhooks, you can:
- Filter by sentiment (positive, negative)
- Flag brand mentions for SEO
- Build digests to review daily, weekly, or monthly
- Assign outreach tasks directly to a team member
That means one feed shows you every new brand mention, every possible unlinked brand mention, and every spike in sentiment.
Brand tracking research used to be slow and expensive. Agencies would deliver reports every six months, often already outdated. Today, the game is hybrid:
- Survey-led insights (Latana, Tracksuit)
- Signal-led insights (brand mentions,SEO and Socials.)
Signals-led can be achieved with tools like Ahrefs, which has a free tier to list your site, and tools like f5Bot which allow you to monitor keywords free in Reddit.
Do you still need brand tracking agencies? Sometimes, yes.
- If you’re in a heavily regulated industry (finance, healthcare)
- If you need third-party data for investors
- If you want to do custom research, there are plenty of great agencies that can run custom surverys and then deliver clear answers to help your brand or products.
But for most startups and SMBs, software is faster, cheaper, and more actionable. |
A mix of brand health trackers (Latana/Tracksuit) and monitoring tools (EchoDash + F5 Bot or GummySearch) covers 90% of use cases.
So what counts as the best brand management software? It’s not about one app. It’s about how the stack works together.
- Latana / Tracksuit brand tracking → Survey data, awareness, preference
- Ahrefs + F5Bot + GummySearch → Real-time brand mentions
- EchoDash → Aggregation, webhooks, email digests
- SEO tool (Ahrefs, Semrush) → Backlink + keyword monitoring
Together, this system acts as your living brand health tracker and reputation command center.
Here’s a practical scenario.
- A Reddit user casually drops your brand name.
- F5Bot flags it.
- EchoDash ingests it via webhook.
- You see it in your morning digest.
- You click through, engage with the user, and later reach out to the blog that picked it up.
- That turns into a backlink.
Multiply this process and suddenly you’ve turned dozens of unlinked brand mentions into high-authority backlinks.
That’s the compounding power of brand mentions for SEO.
We built EchoDash to solve a simple problem: too many alerts, too many dashboards,
too many missed signals.
With webhooks, you can plug in anything—F5Bot alerts, GummySearch data, SEO crawlers.
Instead of fragmented pings, you get a structured feed. Then you layer on email digests:
- “3 new brand mentions yesterday”
- “1 potential unlinked brand mention for outreach”
- “Sentiment shift detected in subreddit conversation”
This is brand tracking you can actually act on.
Key Long-Tail Keywords in Context
Let’s put the focus terms back into context, so this post ranks:
- Brand health tracker: Your daily scorecard of awareness, consideration, preference, and sentiment.
- Latana: A survey-led brand tracking research tool for deeper market segmentation.
- Tracksuit brand tracking: Startup-friendly dashboards that make brand tracking software accessible.
- Brand tracking research: Combining lagging survey data with real-time signal tracking.
- Brand tracking agencies: Still useful for bespoke research, but increasingly supplemented by software.
- Best brand management software: The stack that combines surveys, mentions, SEO, and alerts into one system.
- Brand mentions for SEO: Free authority you can convert into backlinks.
- Unlinked brand mentions: Low-hanging fruit for SEO outreach.
- Brand mentions: The raw material of reputation and authority.
- Find unlinked brand mentions: The tactical play that turns chatter into rankings.
Brand tracking software is no longer optional. If you’re not running a brand health tracker, you’re flying blind.
The winners are already combining:
- Surveys (Latana, Tracksuit)
- Signals (Ahrefs, F5Bot, GummySearch)
- Aggregation (EchoDash with webhooks + digests)
- SEO plays (turning unlinked brand mentions into backlinks)
That’s what the best brand management software setup looks like. It’s proactive, not reactive.
The choice is simple: either monitor your brand in real time—or let your competitors own the conversation.
👉 For more content on dashboards, tools, and growth strategies, check out Echodash.com/blog.
