What is Share of Search & why should I care?
Share of Search, devised by leading researcher of marketing effectiveness Les Binet in 2012, represents a company's share of non-paid searches on Google. This can be a powerful metric for your company as a future predictor of market share. This is particularly relevant in our current economic climate, where most executives are trying to assess the impact of their sales and marketing efforts in light of decreasing year-over-year growth and rising customer acquisition costs.
In other words, an increase in your share of search may indicate that your sales and marketing efforts are paying off, you're stealing market share from the competition, your efforts that are hard to attribute are effective, or that you are about to lose your current position to a competitor.
Here's a compelling chart from the research of Les Binet illustrating the power of Share of Search as a leading indicator to the actual loss in marketshare LG experienced.
Learn more by watching this awesome YouTube video by marketer Les Binet: Share of Search - a new way to track brands & advertising.
How is Share of Search calculated?
To calculate your brand’s share of search, you simply take the number of organic searches your brand received during a specific period and then divide it by the number of searches all the brands in your industry received at that time. You can do this with a simple Google Trends report.
Source: Share of Search
You can perform a detailed calculation by including both big and small brands in your calculations, or you can benchmark your performance against a handful of competitors in a specific market.
When is Share of Search misleading?
One pitfall of the Share of Search metric is that it does not provide reasons for the changes in search volume. When we were analyzing Share of Search for a customer of ours, there was a large spike in traffic due to a competitor declaring bankruptcy - which is clearly not going to lead to a market share increase. But, it was easy enough to remove that competitor and benchmark against the remaining market participants to show a Share of Search increase (indicating they are likely gain in market share).
It can also be a difficult metric for startups, like ours, where major brands own the majority of traffic. In this case use a smaller subset of brands to compare against, or switch to specific keyword research analysis as a better indicator.
How do you perform the analysis?
To begin, write down the companies that you compete against in your industry. I prefer focusing on top 5 companies that are competing for a specific market. For example, let’s examine the search trends of popular business intelligence tools like Looker, Sisense and Qlik Sense.
Next, simply plug all these keywords into Google Trends:
Summarize it and see what percentage of search queries your company gets in comparison to the rest of your competitors. To do this, take your company's branded search traffic and calculate that as a percentage of all the branded search traffic among your competitors.
How is Share of Search different from Share of Voice?
Share of Voice is calculated by comparing a brand's advertising spend compared to the total media expenditure within its industry. High SoV can lead to increased brand awareness, sales, and market share. Share of Voice can lead to gains in both Share of Search and market share, but is much more difficult to attain.
Share of Search Conclusion
Share of Search is a great metric to track because it is often a cheap, easy, and effective leading indicator gauging the effectiveness of your company's marketing efforts. It's also effective when other benchmarks become less indicative due to shifting economic climates.
