10 things you need to know about Share of Search
Effectiveness guru Les Binet has a new favourite topic; Share of Search. He revealed the new metric in October, after a six-year effectiveness investigation, advising marketers to closely monitor how often they are searched for on Google to track their brand’s wellbeing and future market share.
To help marketers get a better understanding of Share of Search, we’ve summarised the top 10 highlights and some implications from Binet’s recent presentation.
1. Share of Search provides a fast, cheap and accurate brand tracking methodology, as it is based on what people DO, not what they SAY. This is valuable because as we know, people don’t always do what they say, or say what they think, or even know what they think.
2. Search correlates strongly with Share of Market in all 3 categories evaluated: auto, energy and phone handsets.
3. Share of Search is a good measure of brand interest. This is a measure somewhere between salience and consideration.
4. Share of Search is a leading indicator of market share, often by 3–6 months, sometimes up to 12 months. Think of it as an early warning system.
- In auto for example, the lead time is 9–12 months. That’s almost a year for an auto brand to respond and avoid a potential decline.
- Implication? Search behaviour data is commonly used to plan tactical marketing activity, but we now know it can inform long term marketing strategies.
5. Brand crisis and other unusual brand events can impact the predictive accuracy of this metric. For example, the Volkswagen emissions crisis saw Share of Search rise (as people searched to find out what had happened), followed by a decrease in Share of Market.
- Therefore, in the next stage of this research Les Binet will be looking at social media sentiment analysis to see if there is some relationship between sentiment and search that can reduce this inaccuracy.
6. There is a strong relationship between Conversion (from Search to Sales) and Relative Price. Brands with lower relative price in their category have a stronger conversion rate.
7. Advertising affects Share of Search. Changes in Share of Voice correlate strongly with changes in Share of Search. This gives us a new, clean way to evaluate the effectiveness of the advertising. (!!)
8. Share of Voice has both a short- and long-term effect on Share of Search.
9. The research reveals a new measure of brand strength: a brand’s Share of Search when Share of Voice is set at 0. In other words: the inherent interest in a brand without any advertising.
10. In Les’ words: “Over the past 30 years, I’ve found that the relationship between tracking metrics and actual purchase behaviour is often surprisingly weak. By tracking Share of Search we have a powerful, not to mention cheap, metric to measure what people are actually doing online, rather than what they say they are doing. It is by no means a silver bullet — the data needs to be interpreted with care and researchers need more detail to be able to apply this to the real world, which is something I will be providing in a further IPA webinar in November. Without doubt though, Share of Search has enormous potential and predictive power to track brands and advertising going forward.”
