30 Performance Metrics to Track Across Your Multi-Brand Portfolio

Key Takeaways

Performance metrics are the cornerstone of every multi-brand portfolio decision. That’s why it’s crucial to track the right data points — and in the right way. In this article, we list 30 performance metrics every multi-brand organization should monitor, and provide tips for making these insights actionable.

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Multi-brand portfolio management is a game of strategy. To win, you must be able to monitor brand performance in real-time, make calculated decisions, and act swiftly — even if that means playing a difficult hand.

Take global giant Unilever as an example. Home to well-known brands such as Dove, Hellman’s, and Domestos, Unilever recently made the decision to demerger its ice cream business in order to refine its portfolio, simplify its image, and, by extension, improve its profitability.

Data was at the core of this decision. Just like data has powered every acquisition, resource allocation, and marketing choice within every successful multi-brand portfolio, from Nestlé to Coca-Cola and beyond.

In this blog, we’re going to dig deeper into this data, and reveal the essential performance metrics all growing multi-brand organizations should be tracking.

30 performance metrics to track for every brand

We can separate performance metrics into four broad categories:

• Financial
• Brand and perception
• Customer behavior and engagement
• Operational efficiency and compliance

The following metrics span these categories. Some of them may not relate to your specific portfolio or sector focus. (For example, a group of travel agencies won’t need to monitor inventory or shipping efficiency, but a group of retail brands will.) However, most of them are ubiquitous across all types of multi-brand organizations.

Financial metrics

For many of us, a crisp dollar bill is the first thing that comes to mind when considering performance metrics. After all, the financial health of your individual brands determines the success of your entire portfolio.

With that in mind, here are some key finance indicators to track for every brand:

1. Revenue growth. What percentage of your total portfolio revenue does each brand contribute? How does this compare to previous years?
2. Profit margins and ROI. What is the profitability of each brand after deducting costs and expenses?
3. Weighted portfolio return. How does the profitability and performance of each brand correspond to its weight in your portfolio?
4. Average transaction value. How much money does the typical customer/client spend per transaction?
5. Customer acquisition cost (CAC). How much does it cost to acquire a new customer, and how has this number changed over the years? As brand equity rises, the CAC should lower.
6. Customer lifetime value. What is the total amount of revenue a brand generates from a single customer?

Brand and perception

Monitoring brand performance and perception is critical for large multi-brand organizations. When establishing or acquiring new brands, the risk of cannibalization and brand dilution increases. What was once a well-perceived brand may become unrecognizable, blurring into the background of its market or segment. This isn’t just a temporary threat to sales — it can lead to brand extinction.

When gauging brand performance and perception, track the following data points:

1. Market share. This indicates how big a share your brands have in their respective market category or segment. If your portfolio contains brands within the same segment, it’s important to compare these numbers regularly.
2. Share of voice, brand mentions, and citations. How often are your brands mentioned in search engines, websites, news channels, social platforms, and LLMs like ChatGPT? It may be helpful to reference SEO and search console tools to extract more granular insights.
3. Brand recall rates. How often are consumers and survey respondents able to recognize your brand from messaging, logos, and color schemes alone? When asked about a certain buying journey or problem, how frequently do your brand/s come to mind?
4. Brand attributes. What qualities and traits do consumers associate with your brands? And do they align with your brands’ independent values?
5. Brand sentiment. What tone do consumers, influencers, and journalists use when writing or speaking about your brands (positive, negative, neutral etc.)?

Customer behavior and engagement

Brand performance stretches far beyond whether a customer makes a purchase or not. You must approach engagement from a holistic perspective. Try to get into the target market’s state of mind and buying expectations, and ask yourself: how do consumers interact with your brands before, during, and after a purchase? How and why do their behaviors change over time?

1. Customer retention. How many repeat customers does each brand have? What is the average retention rate?
2. Loyalty scheme members. If applicable, how many customers belong to your brands’ loyalty programs? Make sure to segment this data if you offer free and paid tiers.
3. Newsletter subscribers. How many consumers opt to receive marketing updates and/or newsletters (whether they’re sent by email, SMS, or mail)?
4. Social media engagement. Source data surrounding follower numbers, post interactions and comments, direct messages, mentions, and more across your brands’ social media channels.
5. Reviews. How many reviews do your brands receive across their website and third-party review platforms? What is the average rating? What is the ratio of negative to positive reviews?
6. NPS rates. Measure the average net promoter score for each brand, based on consumer surveys.
7. Customer complaints and/or support tickets. How often do customers submit complaints to your brands’ support teams?
8. Website visits. Measure the number of website visits and unique sessions across your brand websites within a specified time period.
9. App downloads. If applicable, how many consumers downloaded your brands’ mobile app?
10. Bounce and cart abandonment rates. What percentage of website visitors leave after only viewing one page? And, if applicable, how often do consumers add items to their cart and then don’t complete the purchase?

Operational efficiency and compliance

Last, but certainly not least, is operational efficiency and compliance. This relates to a brand’s adherence to their own values, SOPs, and ethos, as well as your group’s overarching policies and requirements.

Tracking the following metrics is essential for maintaining quality, ensuring regulatory compliance, and improving brand consistency:

1. Order fulfillment and shipping efficiency. How often did orders pass through every stage successfully and reach the intended customer?
2. Customer support ticket resolution. On average, how long does it take for support teams to answer and resolve customer complaints and queries?
3. Inventory turnover. What is the rate of inventory sold and replaced? How often — if at all — did your brands experience stockouts?
4. Return rates. What percentage of customer orders were returned? What was the most common reason?
5. Incidents reported (and time to resolution). How many incidents did employees report and how long did it take for HQ to respond?
6. Training completion. What percentage of employees enrolled in — and passed — compulsory brand, operations, and compliance training?
7. Brand audit scores. How often did each brand and its locations pass or fail standardized brand audits? What is the success rate?
8. Unit inspection rates. Consider the pass and fail rate of other inspections, such as regulatory audits and health and safety checks.
9. Employee turnover. What percentage of employees left each brand within a specific period?

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How to turn your performance data into actionable insights: 4 tips

These are only a fraction of the performance metrics your multi-brand organization will need to track. The chances are, you’ll have many more nuanced data points to add to the list. Some of which may vary across brands according to their sector, regulatory obligations, individual SOPs, and so on.

Regardless of which metrics you track, one thing is clear: this data will only serve its purpose if you know how to harness it.

Bearing this in mind, here are 4 tips for turning your performance data into actionable insights.

1. Consolidate your data

For many portfolio managers, collating performance data involves deep diving into a range of disparate platforms — including CMS and POS systems — and waiting for monthly or quarterly reports from brand representatives.

The administrative burden of this is huge. More than this, the fragmented approach increases the likelihood of duplications, errors, and inconsistencies.

To reduce mental loads and improve accuracy, it’s better to consolidate wherever possible. By unifying your data into one single source of truth, you can get faster, more truthful insights into brand-by-brand performance.

The best way to achieve this is via a centralized solution like Claromentis.

Our digital workplace suite contains three integrated platforms — an AI-powered intranet, no-code business process automation tool, and SCORM-compliant learning management system — as well as a host of intelligent applications. Combined, it acts as the operating system of your entire multi-site organization; making it the perfect place to consolidate your data.

Out of the box, Claromentis provides insights into training completions, policy and SOP acceptance rates, survey results, employee absences, and more. In addition to this, our BPA tool, InfoCapture, allows you to build or configure standardized processes that help brands report data in a consistent and compliant manner. You can complement this data with insights from external tools, thanks to our readily available third-party integrations and custom development services.

2. Build brand-specific performance dashboards

Once your data lives in one home, the next step is to make it accessible.

Visual dashboards are central to this. With an application like Locations, you can build bespoke, data-rich dashboards for every brand in your portfolio. This enables you to analyze real-time performance at a glance, without needing to jump between applications or data sets within the digital workplace system. (Though you may of course choose to do this during quarterly or annual performance reviews.)

3. Track regularly, revise annually

Patterns won’t emerge day-by-day, but rather month-by-month. So dig deeper into your data sets on a quarterly basis, and reserve time for reflection and revisions every year.

The insights gleaned may reveal portfolio-wide or brand-specific problems. Alternatively, they may indicate that your KPIs aren’t ambitious enough. From here, you can either add more granular performance metrics and/or amend individual brand targets.

At this stage, you should also assess external data points, including performance indicators from competitor brands and market reports. This will provide context into your overall portfolio and its performance compared to the wider market.

4. Give your brands insight and autonomy

Your brands want to succeed just as much as you do. Which is why they should have access to their performance data, too.

With the right permissions settings, authorized users will be able to monitor their brand’s financial data, compliance rates, and performance metrics — and adjust their strategy accordingly. This may lead to revised marketing campaigns, supply chain shake-ups, or large-scale customer and market surveys. All executed autonomously, without any nudges or top-down commands from your central management team.

Make smarter portfolio decisions with Claromentis

When all is said and done, it’s impossible to make intelligent portfolio decisions without concrete performance data.

But it’s not enough to simply determine metrics and set KPIs. To make a tangible difference to brand and portfolio performance, you need to assemble your data points and make them actionable.

A comprehensive digital workplace solution like Claromentis helps you standardize, centralize, and visualize performance across every brand. This is thanks to our data-driven applications, third-party integrations, and intelligent Locations application.

To learn more about our solution and how it could enhance your multi-site operations and performance management efforts, book a tailored discussion call with our team today.

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