Share of Search: the new share of voice?

Share of Voice has always been a brilliantly simple metric to help set budgets. If you want to sell x% more than the competitors, you need to be more visible then they are. Overtime consumers will then have your brand top of mind, get curious about you and try your brand or product. It was that simple..

With digital advertising this metric was put on the back burner, as it became somewhat impossible to know how much more you are communicating versus your competitors. 

But a digital world has also made it a lot easier to check how many people actually got curious about your brand. This is why Share of Search is a new brilliantly simple metric to help you set efficiency and justify spend.

“With Share of Voice you measure the input, as in: how much money have I invested,” explains Rodrigo Graviz, CEO at My Telescope “where as with Share of Search, you look at the outcome by checking how many people actually became curious about your brand, product or service. Since SOV isn’t always possible as a metric, SoS can be a great alternative, or I actually think even better.”

There are multiple more reasons why Share of Search can be considered the superior metric, and it depends on what you want to use it for.

1. Justify spend:

   1. Not just channel, also creative:
      When it comes to spending money, SOV was mainly helping to explain why you gave a certain amount of your budget to TV, or any other channel for that matter. It doesn’t say much about the quality of the add, and hence the effectiveness of the advertising agency. The level of the spike in Share of Search though, will not only let you know whether you took the right channels, but also if the message was compelling enough.

   2. Complement owned with bought and earned:
      Share of search will give a clear overview of all the channels that are being used, not just the paid for channels, like advertising or facebook ads, but also PR campaigns or activities run on social media.

2. Allocating budgets:
   Just like share of voice, share of search has a proven correlation towards market share. Why shouldn’t it? It’s only one of the following steps in the process. This means you can also backtrack it from commercial objectives. Once you have identified the correlation ratio towards market share, you can identify by how much you would have to increase the  budget, for every percentage of market share you want to take.

Using share of search doesn’t mean that you have to let go of the Share of voice metric all together. Both are not mutually exclusive, but can work very well hand in hand. Share of Voice can very much provide an oversight of the input of the campaign whilst Share of Search provides insights into the mid-long term, leading up to the desired output of market share gain in the long term. 
“Share of search is an important factor to highlight one more piece of the marketing budget. It brings us an important step closer to getting a 100% oversight of the effectiveness of the marketing budget throughout the marketing efforts and how it contributes to the bottom line,” recaps Rodrigo.