Validation is key to get SoS integrated in the company
Even when having experienced the benefits of working with Share of Search, getting it implemented operationally within the rest of the company is an entirely different story. James Hankins, being one of the founding fathers of Share of Search, has been using the Share of Search to help multiple companies with their marketing strategies or measuring their performance.
“The key is validation. We say there is a connection between Share of Search and other business metrics, so we need to prove it first,” explains James. “By using data data from public institutions, financial reports or desktop research from statistics companies, you can combine them into creating an own ‘share of market’ and correlate the Share of Search to it.”
Although it often is the most powerful in discussions with c-suite, share of market is not the only metric one can compare Share of Search with. Other metrics have been sales numbers or even survey results.
“It depends on what the company is already using as key metric,” explains Fred Pirenne, CSO at MyTelescope, “some of our clients correlated Share of Search with their order intake and saw a very strong correlation in the trends of how both develop. Others correlated it to survey results they are used to track with their leadership team and also there saw correlation on high level results.”
That validation with financial data and survey data has been proven in a variety of different industries that took the leap to test it thus far. They include automotive, FMCG, manufacturing, retail, non-profit and finance.
Juggling numbers around might seem very complicated, but shouldn’t be too hard either. With an excel sheet already a lot can be achieved. If you don’t know how to do it yourself, you can probably get some help, but here is what to think about.
Select the right data:
This starts by looking at what you use internally within your company. If your c-level is used to talk about market share, then use that. However, if they are focused purely on their own sales numbers, or one particular metric like “preference” obtained from surveys, then try to get that data.Data time series:
Search data can be obtained in different variations. From weekly, to monthly to annually. Important is that you adapt it to the data you want to compare it to. If your finance data is monthly, then make sure you have the search data monthly. This will also decide how long your time series need to be. The simple rule is: the more data points you have, the better. We recommend to have at least 12, so if you have monthly data, go back one year. If you have only one annual data point, you’ll need to go back 12 years, which can of course be tricky.Normalise the data:
Search data can have very big spikes, which can be linked to your marketing campaigns. Good job! For validation, we look at trends though, and then it’s easier to take out the spikes by using a so called “moving average”. It’s a function with excel analytical pack that can help you with that.Visualise the data
Seeing is believing. Even if you can show correlation coefficients etc, most people take the results in easier when they can see in a graph how the lines follow each other and develop in a similar way. For this, it’s always recommended to add so trend lines to the graph.
Armed with these visualizations you can start spreading the information around the company and show to management how Share of Search can be a great metric.