Vanguard [see profile] unseated BlackRock's iShares as the top-ranked ETF provider when it comes to advisor loyalty, according to Cogent Research.

The loyalty data is part of Cogent's 2010 Advisor Brandscape Report, for which the firm polled 1,560 advisors.

Vanguard had a net promoter score of 33 percent, up 10 points from last year. (NPS is a standardized loyalty metric developed by Bain & Company and is used across various industries.) iShares had an NPS of 20 percent, representing an eight-point decline.

State Street Global Advisors stayed put in third place with 20 percent. Meanwhile, Pimco has only been in the ETF business for a year and already has been winning fans in the advisor community. The firm had an NPS of 12, making it the fourth-ranked ETF provider on the list.

Cogent officials said Vanguard outperformed other major ETF providers on nine of ten areas of client experience and service.

According to Cogent, the average amount of assets Vanguard captures among the advisors it works with more than doubled from $2.3 million per user in 2009 to $5.5 million in 2010. iShares, for its part, has a per-advisor AUM average of $5.7 million.

"Obviously, in terms of penetration, they have a long way to go to catch iShares, but right now the momentum is clearly with Vanguard," stated John Meunier, principal at Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Cogent. 

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