Share of Search for decision making
Share of Search for Strategic decisions
If you want to get great insights, go straight to the source! So we had the pleasure of speaking to James Hankins, one of the founding fathers of Share of Search and also founder of the marketing strategy consultancy Vizer!
Continuously discovering more use cases for Share of Search as a metric, James shows us today how he uses it to prepare company for taking the right strategic marketing decisions.
“In order to take the right decision, you need to get a clear overview of how the market is moving, but more importantly also what drives your competitors. I have seen that Share of Search lends itself fantastically well to get that oversight. Especially since it is also a comparative financial measure,” explains James during our call.
The key to beating a category is strong analysis of the competitive landscape, but that also means that one needs to compare apples with apples. The simplicity and uniformity of Share of Search is therefore very well suited.
By combining general category knowledge, the Share of Search data already gives an overview of how different competitors move given the same general market conditions. That means one can immediately start seeing patterns of how different actions drove the various brands.
“After having done some initial general desktop analysis about the category including the relation to the finances of the different players, Share of Search shows me how people reacted towards certain actions each brand took,” continues James. “This helps us a great deal forward with the next step, as it clearly identifies certain periods in which we check what exactly those companies did to trigger the reaction in Share of Search.”
The outcome of good analysis stands and falls with the input of course. Getting access to good data is always a challenge when trying to put together an idea on the competition. The accessibility of Share of Search is therefore a big plus. There are free tools or specialised tools available in the market, covering every market imaginable and going back as far as 2004.
“The fact that you have longer time series provides loads of datapoints which will improve the general quality of your analysis. The fact that this is behavioural data that has been tracked and reported consistently throughout time, makes it even more robust as grounds for solid decision taking” concludes James.
Fred Pirenne, CSO at MyTelescope adds that this solid base provides a lot of potential to use Share of Search for so-called “now-casting”. Depending on the industry, some projections with solid probability can be made for the next 6-12months. This is highly dependent on the speed with which the sales cycles take place within a certain category.
“There are certain industries to which we have seen great correlations and also possibilities for solid predictions. A bit more work needs to be done and of course a prediction is never an absolute certainty, but the probabilities are high.”
Starting to use Share of Search for strategic decision making can be challenging at time, but with the help of consultants such as James and tools such as MyTelescope, the threshold is lowered significantly. If you would like to get in touch with James, you can reach him via linkedin