We’ve mentioned multiple times that Share of Search can be a great metric both for the short and the long term effects of brand and marketing activities. Putting that into practice can seem a bit tricky for some, but in essence it’s relatively simple. By using our Share of Search graph, we can quickly provide some information on when and how to look at the numbers.

Campaign effectiveness is all about the right volumes:

The effect of marketing is to trigger interest in a brand and its products or services. So the change in the number of people you actually get interested in looking up your brand, product or service, can be a good indication on whether or not your marketing campaign was successful. Most campaigns last for a couple of weeks, so checking the results on monthly bases will give an overview for the different campaigns. The Share of Search will also give a clear idea on whether the competition has been running equally efficient or better performing campaigns. In this example, we can clearly see that whenever Brand A runs a campaign or introduces a new product, it has an impact on the other brands. This even though everyone’s total sales volumes might go up. It is therefore important to mainly focus on your own search volume and how that increases or decreases vs prior to the campaign. Some categories can also be confronted with seasonal increases. This you will get once you have been tracking for over 12 months. Alternatively you can get an indication on seasonality by combining these numbers with Google trends.

Looking at branding is the long term trend:

Instead of looking at the specific search volumes, it’s all about the general trend. Your Share of Search percentage will most likely not be exactly the same as your market share, or awareness percentage of your last survey.
Check the overall tendencies looking at 3 month periods will indicate if your brand or product has gotten stronger versus the competition or not. How is the overall trend developing for the industry, and how is your trend working towards that?

If you are outperforming your competition with a Share of Search significantly higher than your market share, the overall interest in your brand, product or service is increasing and it will only be a matter of time before you will see the results in your sales numbers. Important here is to understand what the correlation is between the two as well as the lag. The first one, correlation, will let you know how much your sales or your awareness level actually is in comparison to your Share of Search percentage. The second, lag, will indicate how long you have to wait until you see the effects in your sales numbers.

This graphs provides you with two very concrete ways on how you can track whether your marketing campaigns have succeeded to make people choose to look for you!

Using Share of Search