What is Share of Search? Why should I use it?

Search data is a strong indicator to understand trends in sales, market share and social, economical or cultural shifts.

Over 6 billion searches and 2,87 quintillions of databytes are created every day. Behaviors that you can access and analyse through Share of Search analytics. Why rely on opinions when you can get facts by analyzing behaviour.

Today, 81% of us search the web when we are looking to buy something. It could be ingredients for a recipe, a new underground drill, that car we dream of. or a certain dress or jacket.

To be able to understand if a brand or trend is gaining momentum we want to be able to compare that search to a selected brands or topics, that is Share of Search.

Correlation between Search data and bottom line

Research by My Telescope, Les Binet, James Hankins and Google shows that there is a clear correlation between the number of searches and actual market share.

For example: By understanding the Share of Search trend of an ice cream brand we get an indication if our marketing activities are leading to higher sales or resulting in higher market share.

To illustrate these findings you can look at the graph comparing Share of Search and market share data for a well known FMCG brand  in Sweden.

In figure 1 the starting point of Share of Search was 8% and the market share 8%. In figure 2 one can see that the search volume has decreased and the trend for market share data shows the same trend.

The benefit of using search data is that it's easy to follow and spot positive or negative trends. The downside is that the trend Is the same but not the exact percentage numbers.

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.