--- title: What Brand Tracking Costs in Australia and What Moves It description: What brand tracking costs in Australia depends on five things. Which ones move the price, which cuts backfire, and how to compare quotes. image: https://info.brandhealth.com.au/hubfs/ResearchCost.png --- **[![logo](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/hubfs/Imported%20images/Layer_1%20(1).png%3Fwidth=390%26height=50%26name=Layer_1%20(1).png)](https://brandhealth.com.au/)** - [Solutions](https://brandhealth.com.au/brand-research-solutions/) - [Pricing](https://brandhealth.com.au/brand-research-pricing/) - [Resources](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/) - [Contact](https://brandhealth.com.au/contact-brand-research-experts/) - [Login](https://app.brandhealth.com.au/user/login/) ![arrow-right](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/hubfs/raw_assets/public/Brand_Health_April2024%20Theme/images/arrow-curve-right.svg) [Book A Free Consultation](https://brandhealth.com.au/free-consultation/) # What Brand Tracking Costs in Australia and What Moves It ** 11 min Share - [**](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/brand-tracking-cost-australia) - [**](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/brand-tracking-cost-australia) *What drives the cost of an Australian brand tracker, and why the cheapest version is usually the worst value per dollar.* ## Key takeaways 1. **The price of a brand tracker follows its specification.** The standard shape is one market, one consumer audience, a sample of 400, a single annual wave, a questionnaire of about ten minutes, senior analysis and a reporting dashboard, and each step beyond that shape adds cost for a reason you can name. 2. **Questionnaire length is the cost lever most buyers underestimate.** Going from five minutes to ten adds roughly fifty per cent to the price and far more than doubles what the study can answer, because a large share of the cost is fixed regardless of length. 3. **Sample reachability moves the number more than sample size does.** Four hundred general-population consumers is straightforward. Four hundred procurement managers in healthcare is a different exercise entirely, and the price reflects the difficulty of finding them. 4. **Frequency is the most expensive thing most brands buy and the least examined.** Four waves a year cost roughly four times one, and in most categories the metrics have not moved enough between waves to justify it. Nobody in Australian brand research publishes prices. Ask five agencies what a tracker costs and you will get five requests for a scoping call, which is a reasonable way to run a business and a frustrating way to plan a budget. If you are trying to work out whether brand tracking belongs in next year's plan at all, the absence of a number is not neutral. It usually means the line item never gets proposed. So here is what actually moves the number, and which of those levers are worth pulling. It is not a rate card, because every study is specified to the question it answers. It is a way to tell a well-scoped proposal from an expensive one, brief a study with a realistic budget, or decide early that the scope you have in mind does not fit the money available. ## Why nobody in this category publishes a price There are two honest reasons and one less honest one. The first is that research genuinely is specified per project. The same three words, "a brand tracker", can describe a single annual study in one market and a continuous multi-market program costing many times as much. A single published price would be wrong for almost everyone. The second is that a stated number gets quoted back at you. A provider who publishes a floor will be asked why this particular study costs more than the floor, and the answer takes explaining. Silence avoids the conversation. The third reason is that pricing opacity favours the seller. When a buyer has no reference point, the first number they see becomes the anchor, and they have no way to tell a well-scoped program from an expensive one. The fix is not a published price, which would be wrong for most briefs. It is knowing what moves the number, so that any quote can be read against its specification. None of that helps a marketing director trying to build a plan in September for a study that needs to run in February. ## What a brand tracker costs in Australia Three shapes cover most of what Australian organisations actually commission, and each costs more than the one before for reasons you can see in the specification. **The standard shape.** One market, one consumer audience, a sample of 400, a single annual wave, a questionnaire of around ten minutes, senior analysis and a reporting dashboard. It answers the questions most brands need answered: where the brand sits, where it is losing, against whom, and what would need to change. **A broader single wave.** The same structure with a fifteen-minute questionnaire, broader metric coverage and deeper analysis. The extra cost sits mainly in panel time and senior analysis, and it buys more ground in one wave, which in practice means the study can address strategic questions rather than only reporting position. **Multiple audiences or hard-to-reach samples.** Several surveys within one project, or B2B and low-incidence samples. Cost varies most here because the drivers compound: two audiences and a hard-to-reach sample is a different project from two audiences of general consumers. A very short study, five minutes or less, is the cheapest option and occasionally the right one. It is also the option we most often advise against, for reasons the next two sections explain. ## What actually moves the number Five things, in roughly the order they matter. **Sample reachability, not sample size.** Four hundred is the standard base for a national consumer study, and it gives a margin of error of about plus or minus 4.9 per cent at 95 per cent confidence, which is tight enough to make decisions on. Adding respondents costs money but rarely much. What costs money is difficulty. General population is inexpensive. Category buyers are more expensive. Senior decision-makers in a specific industry can cost many times more per completed response, because most of the spend goes on screening out people who do not qualify. [Reaching genuinely niche B2B audiences](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/how-to-actually-reach-the-b2b-audiences-everyone-says-are-impossible) is a specialist exercise and it is priced accordingly. **Subgroup requirements.** This is the one that catches most briefs. A national figure needs 400. A national figure plus a defensible read by state needs a great deal more, because each state needs its own usable base. Every cut you intend to make a decision on has to be sampled for. Deciding those cuts at the briefing stage rather than at the reporting stage is the single biggest cost saving available to a buyer. **Questionnaire length.** Longer surveys cost more per respondent, because panel incentives scale with time. But the relationship is not linear, and that matters more than it sounds. See below. **Number of waves.** The most expensive variable and the least interrogated. Four waves cost roughly four times one wave. In categories where awareness and perception shift over quarters rather than weeks, three of those waves are usually measuring noise. We have written before about [why we advise most clients out of continuous tracking](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/why-we-fired-our-always-on-tracker-and-went-back-to-annual-research), and the argument is commercial as much as methodological. **Analysis depth.** The difference between a data file with charts and a report that tells you what to do about it is senior time. It is the part of a research budget that most directly determines whether the study changes a decision, and the part most often cut first. ## Why is the cheapest tracker usually the worst value? Because a large share of the cost of a brand tracker does not depend on how long the survey is. Designing the questionnaire, setting the sample frame, programming and testing, cleaning the data, weighting it, analysing it and writing it up all have to happen whether the survey runs for five minutes or fifteen. Only the panel incentive scales cleanly with length. That produces a specific and counter-intuitive result. Going from a five-minute questionnaire to a ten-minute one adds roughly fifty per cent to the price and buys a study that can answer perhaps twice as much, because the fixed work is already done and the extra spend is buying question time rather than overhead. The five-minute version is not a cheaper brand tracker. It is a different and much thinner product. It will give you awareness, consideration and a favourability score. It will not have room for the competitive set, the attribute battery, the drivers of choice, or the diagnostic questions that explain why the numbers are what they are. You will get a position without an explanation, which is precisely the failure mode we describe in [what to measure and why the levels alone tell you very little](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/brand-health-metrics). The practical consequence: if your budget only stretches to the five-minute version, the highest-return decision is usually to find the difference and commission the study that can actually answer something. If the difference genuinely is not there, an annual ten-minute study every second year will teach you more than a five-minute study every year. ## How to read a research quote Four things worth checking, whoever you are talking to. **What sample, and how reached.** A quote should state the base size and the source of the sample. Panel quality varies enormously and it is invisible in the final report, which is why [poor sample can quietly invalidate an entire study](https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/that-research-you-paid-for-it-might-be-garbage) without anyone noticing. **Which subgroups are supported.** Ask directly: which cuts of this data can I present to my board without a caveat? If the answer is national only, and you intended to report by region, the study is mis-specified and you want to know now. **Who does the analysis.** In larger agencies, the senior person who scopes the study is often not the person who analyses it. That is not necessarily a problem, but it should be a stated fact rather than an assumption. **What is fixed and what recurs.** Setup costs are largely one-off. A second wave of an existing tracker should cost meaningfully less than the first, because the design work is done. If a quote for wave two matches wave one, ask why. ## What this means for planning If you are building a plan now for research that runs next year, fix the specification before you fix the number: the market, the audience and how hard it is to reach, the subgroups you need to report on, the questionnaire length and the number of waves. With those settled, a provider can price the study in one short conversation, and the figure you take into the budget round describes a study rather than a guess. The more valuable thing to take away is the shape of the trade-off. Almost every instinct a budget-constrained team has about reducing research cost is the wrong lever. Cutting questionnaire length saves little and costs a great deal. Cutting sample below the point where your subgroups hold makes the study undecidable. Cutting analysis produces data nobody acts on. The lever that does work is frequency, and it is the one nobody pulls, because quarterly tracking sounds more rigorous than annual tracking and nobody wants to argue the opposite in front of a board. In most Australian categories, one properly built annual wave with real depth, supplemented by a short dip when a campaign or a market event demands one, will produce better decisions than four thin quarterly waves at four times the price. That is not a cheaper version of brand tracking. It is a better-designed one that happens to cost less. ## Frequently asked questions **Why does the same brief get quoted at very different prices?** Usually because the studies are not the same, even when the brief is. Providers make different assumptions about sample source, base size, subgroup support and how much senior time goes into analysis, and those assumptions rarely appear in the price. The way to compare quotes is to fix the specification yourself: state the base, the audience definition, the subgroups you need to report on and the questionnaire length, then ask each provider to price that. Differences that survive are real. **Is a cheaper syndicated dashboard a reasonable substitute?** For some purposes. Syndicated products cost less because the questionnaire is shared across subscribers, which is also their limitation: you get a standard metric set on a standard audience, and you cannot ask your own questions. If your need is a comparable read on awareness and consideration in a covered category, they work. If you need to know why your consideration is falling, or how a specific segment responds to a specific proposition, the questions that answer that are the ones a shared questionnaire cannot carry. **Can we run a tracker in-house to save money?** You can, and the saving is smaller than it looks. The survey tool is the cheap part. The cost sits in sample sourcing, questionnaire design that does not bias the answers, weighting, and the analysis that turns a data file into a decision. Teams that try this usually produce a first wave successfully and then find the second wave is not comparable to the first, at which point the trend data, which is the entire point of tracking, is gone. --- If you need a figure before research can go into a plan, tell us the brief and the budget you are working to, and we will say plainly what that budget can buy. When you are ready to specify a study properly, we will scope it with you and quote against the brief rather than against a template. [Schedule a free 30-minute consultation to talk through scope and budget for your next brand study.](https://brandhealth.com.au/free-consultation/) Or if your brief is already clear, [request a custom quote directly.](https://brandhealth.com.au/brand-research-pricing/) --- **Tom Morris** is Managing Director of Brand Health, an Australian brand research consultancy specialising in custom brand tracking. [Connect on LinkedIn.](https://www.linkedin.com/company/19272912) Share - [**](http://www.linkedin.com/shareArticle?mini=true&url=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/brand-tracking-cost-australia) - [**](https://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https://info.brandhealth.com.au/blog/brand-tracking-cost-australia) # Let us be your guide Discover how Brand Health can help you unlock insights to drive your brand's growth! 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