Tutorial: How Share of Search is calculated
How is your Share of Search calculated?
The concept of Share of Search is getting a lot of attention. The metric is a great proxy for other metrics like Share of Voice and interest. Share of Search also has strong correlations towards market share and is recommended by as a leading business indicator.
The calculations follow the same principles as when calculating market share:
1) Define your competitive set
2) Divide each individual brand's 12-month rolling average by the total and turn into a %.
3) This is your Share of Search.
What is Share of Search?
For decades it’s been near impossible for organisations to show what is actually creating and driving your share of market. Making it hard for marketers to prove the value of their work and business-leaders to know how much to invest in it.
Today, 81% of us use search when we are looking to buy something, it could be that car we dream of or it could be a certain dress or jacket. It's based on exactly the same principle as sales and market share, but uses the number of times a brand's name is typed into a search engine.
Share of Search a leading business indicator:
The definition of Share of Search: the volume of search queries for a brand as a proportion of all of the search queries for all the brands defining a category. By making the number of times people type a brand’s name into a search engine relative to its competitors, we are able to capture brand top-of-mind and remove bias from respondents forced responses, low response rates, overall category growth or seasonal fluctuations.
As proof to the pudding, share of search has been shown by Les Binet & James Hankins to predict market share development (for some categories, enough time to course-correct and invest in success or steer away from disaster).
Read more about Share of Search at the Share of Search Institute: https://www.myshareofsearch.com/