Share of search
Share of search is your brand's portion of all the organic search queries people make for brands in your category. It counts what buyers type into a search engine, not the paid search ads you buy. Marketers track it as a low-cost, frequent read on brand demand that sits alongside market share and share of voice in the effectiveness toolkit.
How it is measured
Share of search = searches for your brand / total searches for all brands in the category
The inputs can be taken from Google Trends, are free, generally go back to 2004 and can be pulled weekly. Fix your list of competitor brands first and keep it stable, or the denominator will drift.
A concrete case
Binet tested the metric in automotive, energy and mobile phone handsets. It correlated with market share in all three categories and behaved as a leading indicator. The gap between the two, which he called the Extra Share of Search (ESOS), tracked market share movements. For cars, the lead time ran up to a year.
He also linked it to advertising. With sustained advertising, 60% of searches came from long-term effects and 40% from short-term effects. When share of voice fell below a brand's equilibrium level, share of search tended to fall over the next two years.
Usual mistakes
- Treating it as a perfect predictor. Conversion is also affected by other factors, particularly price.
- Counting every search as good news. Not all search activity is positive, so a spike after a product problem can look like a gain.
- Mixing paid search data into an organic metric.
- Reading a campaign burst as a trend. The short-term effect of advertising dies away quickly, while the longer-term effect decays slowly.
When it matters to you
In our view, it earns its place when the board asks what brand spend is buying before sales data catches up. Chart your share of search against market share by quarter and put it in your board deck. It also helps when the research budget is thin, because the data costs nothing.
Sources
Written by the CMO Tribune Desk and edited by Lila Odinaev. Every factual sentence was checked against a passage on the source it cites. See how we work, or report an error on the corrections page.