Share of Voice vs Share of Search

Share of Voice and Share of Search are both gauges for the market a brand owns in its category relative to its competitors.

Share of Voice measures several paid and organic metrics across the market. With Share of Search, the focus is on organic brand searches over a rolling 12-month period.

Both measures help marketers to understand brand awareness and the authority a brand has among its customers.

They are equally valuable as market share is one of the most important metrics in business. However, it can often be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to get this information. Especially your competitors’ turnover. Step in Share of Voice and Share of Search.

Here are some of the key differences between Share of Voice and Share of Search:

Share of Voice is a gauge for brand visibility and how much a brand dominates conversation in the industry. It’s the number of conversations about your brand, divided by the total number of conversations about your category.

Traditionally, it refers to a brand’s share of paid advertising (print, radio, TV) compared to all competitors. But now, its wider definition includes all forms of measurable brand awareness such as:

Website traffic
Impressions
PPC
Revenue
Mentions
Hashtags

To calculate Share of Voice, you divide a brand’s measures by the total market measures in the category.

While Share of Voice is a very useful metric alone, it also correlates highly with its share of the market and revenue.

Being aware of your Share of Voice gives you more insight into your current position and challenges. It also supports a strategy to grow your business and attract more customers.

Ideally, brands should look to achieve a higher Share of Voice than market share. This is an excess share of voice (eSOV) and is a long-term force to increase market share.

There are several software tools to make calculating Share of Voice easier. These include Hubspot, Sprout Social, Talkwalker, Google Ads, Ahrefs, SEMRush, and Brandwatch.

This is the average of searches on a brand’s name relative to all the brands in the same category over a 12-month rolling period.

Share of Search itself is interesting alone - how many people search on one brand vs another. But what makes this gauge incredibly useful is that Share of Search is an accurate _leading indicator _for market share.

Being aware of Share of Search insight allows marketers to act in advance of predicted market changes. Businesses can then make strategic decisions to gain market share.

Analysis shows a strong correlation for leading Fortune 500 companies between Share of Search and market share. If Share of Search is higher than market share, then eventually market share will rise to match Share of Search.

Share of Search insights should be an essential part of metrics you measure to be strategic with your marketing.

To calculate Share of Search easily, SearchShare is an easy tool with different levels of functionality depending on your organisation’s needs.

Mapping your market position

Share of Voice and Share of Search are both measures that help determine your position in the market. As a result, they are metrics that show you where you are now, where you could be, and how to get there.

Importantly, both measures are based on the online behaviour of consumers. This makes them more accurate than, for example, traditional focus groups.

The insights you discover from both measures will be a great source of competitor insights. They will also support strategic product and marketing decisions. Lastly, they will help track the effectiveness of these decisions.

Share of Voice helps identify areas to improve on such as organic traffic or social media to improve organic strategies.

With Share of Search, you can take strategic action. Understanding predicted changes in market share helps better serve your audience and outperform the competition.

For future campaigns, use findings from Share of Voice and Share of Search reports to stay on top of trends. These will help you get an in-depth look at your current position to win more market share.

What to get Share of Search insights? Sign up for SearchShare today!