Brand protection is a unique challenge for businesses of all sizes across every industry. In the digital world, brands must be proactive, informed, and adaptable to tackle the growing presence of online scammers and bad actors.
More than ever, insightful data is driving brand protection strategies. But which data points are important? How can you determine which key performance indicators (KPIs) you should be paying attention to? And, why is it important to focus your brand protection strategy through one centralized platform?
In this blog we’ll be delving into a few key topics to help you learn about the brand protection KPIs you should be measuring, including:
- The key: Prioritization
- Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should you measure to ensure effective brand protection?
- Is your current reporting giving you the full picture?
- How a centralized platform can transform your brand protection strategy
The key: prioritization
Prioritization is the key to developing a successful brand protection strategy. While many KPIs may be interesting or useful, it’s essential to know which indicators are the most important and insightful. Look at your brand’s goals and the threats most pressing to prioritize the most important tasks and start working on them first. Custom priorities help organize which listings to tackle first, enhancing your ability to focus on the most critical issues.
To mitigate the impact on their consumers, reputation, and revenue, it’s vital to identify and act against the most high-risk cases. Utilizing tools like Red Points’ Custom Priorities feature helps act against top-priority incidents and configure a strategy based on specific needs. Additionally, the Seller Risk Score takes prioritization to the next level by identifying who are the top sellers to focus on.
By embracing prioritization and these specific tools, actions can be quick and effective. The main KPIs to track the impact of coverage include the economic value of infringements removed and the breakdown of the key products on the infringing listings. This approach ensures a targeted and efficient response to brand protection challenges.
Which Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) should you measure to ensure effective brand protection?
Every business has its challenges to overcome and objectives to meet. Your business’s KPIs should align with these challenges and objectives to ensure you are always steering towards progress.
There are a few general KPIs that we believe are useful for all businesses to pay attention to. By measuring a variety of KPIs that align with your business’s vision you will be able to ensure effective brand protection and evolve your workflows.
Here are some of the KPIs you should be measuring:
- Number of infringements detected and removed
Many businesses are simply not aware of the scale of infringements involving their IP and assets. By tracking this KPI you will be able to more accurately balance your resources and workflows to ensure you are tackling all infringements. In a brand survey we conducted, 71.6% of respondents used this insightful KPI to measure brand protection success.
- Top infringing platforms
By measuring the top infringing platforms you will be able to refine your search and invest more resources into uncovering the most damaging offenders. As you identify particular platforms and sites you will also be able to analyze how you ought to interact with these platforms moving forward.
- The most infringed products
Which products are most consistently targeted? By tracking this KPI you can then allocate protection and support to certain products over others. This will help you efficiently safeguard your brand and assets.
- Success rate of enforcement (infringement removed / infringement detected)
Just over 61% of brands we surveyed use this KPI to measure the effectiveness of their brand protection. This indicator allows you to see how effective you are in removing the infringements you detect. A good enforcement success rate (ESR) should go above 80%. There could be multiple reasons why a listing wasn’t enforced, such as the lack of intellectual property registration, incomplete reporting, or an unresponsive platform. If your ESR is low, it’s important to identify the reasons and determine whether it’s relevant to your company.
For instance, you may detect several infringements in a Southeast Asian platform, but that market may not be important for your business. In such a case, registering your trademark there may not make sense.
- Non-enforceable listings
This KPI is particularly helpful as listings are usually non-enforceable because of a lack of intellectual property (IP). Therefore measuring these listings will help you understand where you may need to register trademarks or other forms of IP depending on the priorities and focus of your business.
- Economic value of infringements removed
In our survey, 34.1% stated that they used this KPI to measure success when protecting their brand. This metric represents the total monetary value of the removed infringements. If your core problem is counterfeiting, it reflects the worth of counterfeit products removed from the market. There’s no reference value for this KPI as it depends on the price of the infringing products, and it may not reflect the effectiveness of your actions. However, it provides stakeholders with a meaningful measure of your brand protection strategy’s impact on the market.
- Seller information & top infringers
If you can classify infringements based on impact, you should do the same with sellers. At Red Points, we have a specific feature that tackles this matter, the Seller Risk Score. This transformative predictive solution helps identify high-risk sellers, enhancing your ability to focus on impactful brand protection and proactive fraud prevention.
A seller who only sells one infringing product on a non-relevant platform is different from a repeat infringer who sells 50 counterfeits on top-priority platforms. The Seller Risk Score analyzes and correlates data across listings and platforms to anticipate future fraud. It provides a percentile rank, indicating the level of risk associated with a particular seller by considering factors such as the number of infringements, stock, reviews, transaction data, and shared platform infringements.
By understanding the risk associated with each seller, you can make informed decisions to prioritize interactions, consider recurring incidents, and focus on impactful takedowns. This approach becomes strategic when combined with Custom Priorities, allowing rules like labeling listings from high-risk sellers as critical. The goal is to prioritize, focus on impact, and optimize online revenue recovery effectively. This functionality is not just about managing current threats but anticipating and mitigating future risks, offering a proactive stance in your brand protection strategy.
- Most common infringement types (counterfeit, copyright, impersonation…)
There are important differences between replicas and counterfeits, copyright infringement, and brand impersonation. Each one has its legal implications. By tracking this KPI, you can gain valuable insights into the root causes of your business challenges and use that information to develop effective Intellectual Property strategies.
- Top infringing countries
You have to have a global approach to brand protection because infringers are operating from all around the world. Measure the top infringing countries to pinpoint areas of particular interest and exposure. This is particularly important when dealing with copyright and trademark violations as IP law varies from country to country.
Is your current reporting giving you the full picture?
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. If your current reporting process is limited, you will most likely fail to comprehensively protect your brand. Without the full picture, you may jump to the wrong conclusions, pursue dead-ends, and leave your brand open to attacks.
Your reporting should be:
- Accurate and up-to-date – You can’t generate fresh insights unless you have new, constantly updated, and relevant reports. The brand protection environment is constantly evolving and your reporting has to match this with accurate insights tailored to your needs.
- Exportable and shareable – Brand protection requires collaboration within and across teams. It is vital, therefore, that your reporting is easily exportable and shareable. It needs to be accessible to a diverse selection of stakeholders and in a variety of circumstances.
- Visually accessible – It doesn’t matter how good the data is if you can’t understand it because it is poorly expressed. The solution is to have visually accessible dashboards and reports that prioritize key information and simplify complex data points. This will help you get the full picture and put your business in the position to act.
How a centralized platform can transform your brand protection strategy
A centralized platform can transform your brand protection strategy by not only boosting your measuring capability with technology but also diversifying and enhancing how you tackle different types of infringements. Accurate, personalized, and exportable data and reports are vital for staying ahead of bad actors targeting your brand and customers across various fronts.
Red Points’ Brand Protection Software is a centralized platform trusted by over 1,300 companies. It’s designed to address a wide array of challenges, including impersonation, domain protection, NFTs, ad protection, and more, making it a comprehensive tool for modern brand defense. Here are a few of the key elements we focus on:
- Personalization and prioritization – Our Custom Priorities feature allows your business to prioritize links based on particular preferences and goals, including the type of infringement, whether it’s counterfeit goods, digital impersonation, unauthorized domains, or deceptive ads. These can be adapted to suit your brand’s evolving needs and will put you on a fast track to dealing with the most severe IP infringements. Set your priorities at Critical, High, Medium, or Low to determine the order in which you process infringement incidents.
- Visual data and custom dashboards – Tackling various infringement types requires a clear understanding of the landscape. Our custom dashboards provide a tailored view of relevant data, allowing you to observe behavioral trends, learn about revenue impact, and get insights on pricing and keywords across all types of infringements. Capture over 600 data points in a visually insightful and comprehensible way to ensure that you can leverage the best data to protect your brand across all fronts.
- Clustering technology – This technological approach to brand protection allows us to gather and connect IP infringement data across online platforms, whether it’s counterfeit listings, domain infringements, or fraudulent NFTs. Clustering technology helps determine the size of the problem and tackle it at the root, providing a consolidated view of all infringement types and enabling strategic enforcement actions.
Chris Baker, General Manager Europe at Keepcup, noted that “Without Red Points, we probably wouldn’t even have known about all of the counterfeitings that were out there”.
With Red Points, you’re not just addressing individual incidents but building a robust and responsive brand protection strategy that adapts to the ever-evolving digital landscape. By providing a centralized solution that covers a wide range of infringement types, we empower businesses to become efficient, informed, and proactive in their brand protection efforts.
What’s next
IP leaders are facing increasing pressure to work in fast-changing environments, show clear ROI of IP initiatives, secure a healthy budget, and tackle infringements. Your brand’s approach to KPIs can be a vital difference-maker when it comes to dealing with scammers and overcoming these issues.
It is important to adapt your KPIs to the evolving challenges your brand is facing. As you focus on the KPIs that are relevant to your business and goals you will be able to refine your brand protection strategies.
One of the best ways to protect your brand online across a variety of platforms is by using a centralized platform. To ensure you are staying ahead of bad actors, this platform should be visual, adaptable, in-depth, and relevant. Most importantly any platform you use should allow you to prioritize so that you quickly and effectively mitigate the impact on your customers, revenue, and reputation.
To learn more about how your business can improve its brand protection efforts, request a demo here.