5 Free Marketing Tools CPG Brands Can Use to Measure Brand Health | Left Hand Agency CPG High Five
- 2 days ago
- 5 min read
Brand health tracking has a reputation problem. Say the phrase out loud and most marketers picture a six-figure Circana or Kantar contract, a syndicated panel, a research team. Those tools are very useful, and also very expensive.
Most emerging to midsize brands can't afford them, but they still need a way to assess how they're actually faring in the real world using some free marketing tools.
Here's the thing: consumers are already telling you how your brand is doing. They're searching for you, clicking on you, asking AI assistants about you. You just have to know where to look to see this data.
In this week’s High Five, we’re breaking down 5 free tools that give you great directional metrics on brand health. These can be useful in justifying marketing budget increases, identifying wins that haven’t shown up yet in revenue numbers, and improving how your brand is showing up every day.
None of these replace formal brand tracking, but stacked together, they'll tell you more about where your brand is headed than most people realize is possible FOR FREE!
“Are people thinking about us?”
Google Trends is the simplest gut check for growing awareness, and it's grossly underused.
There are two ways to run Google Trends:
Track your brand over time. You run marketing for the sparkling water brand, Polar Seltzer. Pull the last 12–24 months of branded search. Did interest keep climbing after your last campaign ended, or did it snap back down the day the media stopped? Sustained lift after the spend stops is the tell that you built something, not just borrowed attention for a quarter.
Compare yourself to the category. This is also known as Share of Search. Line Polar Seltzer up against LaCroix, Waterloo, Bubly, Spindrift, and other competitors. This is not a vanity stat: research has repeatedly shown Share of Search tracks with actual market share shifts over time. If your share of the search conversation is growing, that's mental availability building in real time. You can slice and dice this based on things like search trends, topics, geography and more along with changing the time duration.
Cost: FREE
“Are people searching for us specifically?”
If Trends tells you interest is growing, Search Console tells you exactly how people are finding you. It shows the actual queries, impressions, and click-throughs landing on your site.
For example, your refrigerated dip brand, Garden Grove Dips, lands in 500 new stores. A few months later, Search Console starts showing climbing impressions on "Garden Grove Dips," "Garden Grove Spinach Dip," "Garden Grove near me."
That's not a coincidence. That's shoppers who saw you on shelf and went looking for you afterward. Watch branded impressions as a share of total traffic, clicks, and average position. Growth here means retail distribution and advertising are actually converting into search behavior.
Cost: FREE
3. GA4
“Are people intentionally showing up?”
GA4 tells you what real visitors do once they land on your site, not an estimate, the actual traffic.
For CPG brands selling primarily through retail, your site was never going to be the sales engine, but it's still one of the cleanest signals of intent you have.
Here’s an example: Wild Trail Granola launches its first CTV campaign. Three months out, direct traffic is up 38%, organic is up 24%, new users are up 31%.
Nobody's necessarily buying granola on the website, but they went looking for the brand on purpose. That's the signal. Focus on direct traffic, new users, organic traffic, and returning visitors, and skip the vanity metrics like average engagement time. They don't tell you anything about brand health.
Cost: FREE
4. Similarweb
“Are we gaining ground on competitors?”
Similarweb is your competitive intelligence layer: estimated traffic for you and everyone else in your set, so you can see who's actually gaining momentum online versus who's coasting.
Let’s say you’re running Morning Meadow Oatmilk. Pull up your traffic against a few competitors and you find you're up 28% over six months, one competitor's flat, and another's traffic is almost entirely paid-search-dependent while yours is increasingly direct and organic.
The estimates aren't perfect, nobody's are, but the trendlines are the useful part.
Cost: The free tier gives limited reports and comparisons, while paid unlocks historical data, deeper competitive breakdowns, and channel-level detail.
5. Rankless AI
“Are we visible where people are asking AI what to buy?”
This is the newest addition to the stack, and it matters more every quarter. Consumers are asking ChatGPT and other AI assistants "what's the healthiest granola" or "best natural deodorant" the same way they used to ask a friend or Google it. If your brand doesn't come up, you're invisible in one of the fastest-growing discovery channels in the category.
Rankless AI scores your visibility across AI-powered search and shows you where competitors are getting recommended instead of you.
Peak Pantry Protein Bars runs an assessment, for example, and finds competitors showing up consistently in AI answers while Peak Pantry barely registers. That's a flag to invest in the website content, product data, PR coverage, and retailer content that AI systems are actually pulling from.
Cost: free for a basic assessment, paid for ongoing monitoring and competitive benchmarking.
Bonus: SparkToro.
Build the audience before you measure it.
SparkToro doesn't measure your brand, it measures your buyers, which is arguably more useful at the planning stage.
Launching an organic snack brand? SparkToro might show your audience overindexes on Huberman Lab, Outside Magazine, registered dietitians on Instagram, and trail-running YouTube, channels that have nothing to do with traditional food media. That reshapes your media plan, your influencer list, and your PR targets before you've spent a dollar.
Cost: the free tier has limited searches, while paid unlocks more searches, exports, and deeper audience detail.
The bigger picture of these free marketing tools
No single number defines brand health.
The brands that actually win aren't the ones with one good dashboard. They're the ones where multiple signals move together, month over month.
Is search interest growing on Google Trends?
Are people finding us by name on Search Console?
Are people showing up on purpose in GA4?
Are we gaining on competitors on Similarweb?
Are we discoverable in AI answers on Rankless AI?
When all five are moving in the same direction, you're not just seeing a sales bump. You're watching mental availability get built: the odds that a shopper thinks of your brand standing in the aisle, scrolling a retailer app, or asking an AI assistant what to buy.
For an emerging CPG brand, that's the strongest leading indicator of growth you're going to find without a six-figure research budget
We are Left Hand Agency, a CPG media buying agency helping brands grow with short and long-term strategies. Our memory-driven strategies deliver results your marketing and finance teams will champion.
