Share of Search: Thoughts and suggestions from a performance marketer

Les Binet, the Head of Effectiveness at adam&eveDDB a world-renowned expert in the field of marketing effectiveness, has been using Google Trends to analyse the value of a brand against rivals.

By looking at search data and following the trends, Binet has been able to identify how frequently someone searches for a brand name compared to its competitors. Measuring search volume over time allows marketers to gain insights into consumer awareness, as well as the popularity and visibility of a certain brand within its industry.
An added benefit of using this share of search tool is the snapshot of the future, so to speak – the data hinting at emerging trends and changes in consumer behaviour.

What is Share of Search?

Let’s backtrack a second before we dive into the details. The term Share of Search (SoS) refers to the measure of online search volume for a certain brand when compared against industry competitors.

Share of Search is most commonly used as a tool to gain insights into the way a company’s visibility and popularity evolve, which indirectly gives marketers a peek into metrics such as consumer interest and brand market share.

What is Share of Voice?

Traditionally, Share of Voice (SoV) refers to the metric that reflects how a brand’s advertising presence stacks up against that of competitors across a certain media channel or market.
Most commonly it looks at the advertising impressions of media spend a company is putting behind their marketing efforts, and compares that to the overall advertising in that industry. In essence, it’s an indicator of how much a brand is shouting about its offering to its competitors.

Share of Search vs Share of Voice

Share of Search is essentially a digital take on the Share of Voice metric. In Share of Voice uses, a brand’s advertising and visibility to estimate market share.

Share of Search uses search volume to the same effect. With the growth or decline of brand searches over time, you can predict where a brand is heading in terms of market share. As you’d probably expect, when a brand’s Share of Search goes up (i.e. more people search for a brand, usually due to increased advertising), increased market share soon follows.

Benefits of digital insights

The popularity of digital insights like Share of Search has helped support marketing campaigns where in the past more data and digital insights were needed. In many of our collaborative campaigns with media agencies, we have felt more data and digital insight were needed, and the Liberty teams have often had to push for it. That’s why we consider Share of Search tools, which bring the two sides of the marketing industry together, and consider mutual data such as search activity a good thing.

Share of Search first became the talk of the advertising world in the second half of 2020, and since then, plenty of agencies and marketing departments have already started integrating it into their work.

During the initial peak of popularity, I joined webinars, watched tutorials and read guides on how Share of Search is used and I had mixed feelings about what I saw, heard and read. It seems those less familiar with how Google data is presented or best used weren’t gaining insights as accurate or valuable as they could be.

I have been working in the world of SEO and PPC for nearly two decades, and have always loved effective non-digital advertising campaigns. So, keep reading to hear my thoughts on how to make sure the data you use to make brand decisions is accurate, and how to know whether you’ve considered the quirks that come with keyword research.

Improving your data: Google Trends vs Google Keyword Planner 

Many agencies and consultants would use Google Trends as their sole data source building it into their activity. But we’ll prioritise the Google Keywords Planner instead.

Google Trends is great because it’s free, easy to use and has lots of historical data, but the Google Keyword Planner within Google Ads gives you more detail on what’s happening with searches and a wider variety of data.

It’s important to note that even though the two Share of Search tools both pull from the same database, what you are shown is presented differently. Google Trends shows data for all searches made but the data is normalised so that it’s easy to compare to other search trends. As Google states, Trends shows interest over time, defined as:

Interest over time: Numbers represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region and time. A value of 100 is the peak popularity for the term. A value of 50 means that the term is half as popular. A score of 0 means that there was not enough data for this term.”

So, Google Trends is great for knowing if things are increasing or declining in popularity, whereas the Keyword Planner shows you the actual search volume data. However, it’s only for searches when an advert has been shown. As Share of Search is a brand value measurement, we don’t recommend using Keyword Planner exclusively when looking at brand keywords. If no advertisers have been bidding on that brand, there will be no data, so it will show as artificially low.

Neither tool is perfect and ultimately, they are designed for different uses. However, if you are looking to bring Share of Search into your marketing decision-making, it’s worth gathering data from both Share of Search tools, so you have a fuller picture. This way, you can determine not just the trajectory of your brand but also the number of searches being made compared to your rivals.

As with most things, the larger the dataset, the better. Our SEO and PPC teams within Liberty do keyword research using:

• Google Trends
• Google Keyword Planner
• Other tools from Google, such as Search Console Queries
• Multiple third-party tools, such as Moz, SEMrush and Keywords Everywhere.

It’s worth combining all of these, then and exploring any discrepancies and averaging out the data wherever possible.

Choosing your brand keywords

When you are tracking the path of a brand and its popularity, there are a few things to consider.

The first is the various uses of a word. When comparing the rise and fall of car brands, “Jaguar” might seem as a great keyword. But in reality searches “Jaguar” will be split between the cars and the animals. This isn’t a problem “Hyundai” will have, so it will skew the data in their favour.

This is common across most sectors so it’s worth considering. When we consulted with the clothing retailer Peacocks on their Google Search Ads, we recommended turning off brand bidding. This was mainly because no rivals were appearing for their brand so it was just cannibalising organic traffic. Buy they were spending budget on people looking for birds. The same applies to “Dreams” – are you shopping for a bed, or are you trying to figure out what your last nightmare meant?

Consider which other searches are being made that can clash with your brand and those of the rivals you are comparing yourself to, and then build this into your data sets and consider it when concluding. On the flip side of this is that there might be different ways of searching for your brand name. Using coffee chains as an example, here’s how big of an issue this can be:

Which of these should you analyse? Or should it be the sum of them all? to do the brand justice? This isn’t an issue for Starbucks (similar to Hyundai), so their data will be cleaner meaning itdoesn’t present a like-for-like for the team at Caffe Nero to compare with.

Choosing your categories

One of the biggest problems with using Google Trends to make brand decisions is how things are categorised, and the huge discrepancies this creates.

Here’s a snapshot of the last 12 months for the three largest coffee chains in the UK, when you search for their brand names as “search terms” versus choosing the “company” metric:

That’s a big difference.

If you export this data, Starbucks has an ‘interest over time’ value of 65 as a company, compared to Costa Coffee with 55, and Caffe Nero at 13. As search terms, meanwhile, Starbucks’ lead of 63 is miles ahead Costa with 14, and Nero at 7:

As a search term, “Starbucks” does perform over three times better than “Costa Coffee”, but as a company, they are nearly neck and neck.

Someone reviewing this and setting out the advertising budget for Costa Coffee would make significantly different decisions based on these two figures. One set of data shows Costa on par with Starbucks, while the other says they are just a third of the way there. So be careful with this data – the wisest approach would be to use all variants so you have as much data as possible to pull from.

Google explains the difference here. The gist of it is: “Search terms show matches for all terms in your query, in the language given” but “topics are a group of terms that share the same concept in any language.”

As any PPC professional will tell you, the way Google views synonyms and clusters keywords together is often unhelpful. I’d recommend mainly basing your decisions on the Search Term and not any Company or Topic where related keywords are aggregated into one figure. That said, using that as secondary data to explore if an inconsistency pops up and needs further analysis.

Getting the most from the Google Keyword Planner

Google’s Keyword Planner is a free-to-use tool but you need to have a Google Ads account to access it and you need to be spending some decent money on PPC with Google to get the most out of it. Here’s the difference in the data you see between an account with a low spend (a few thousand a month) and an account with a much higher spend (£250+ last year):

The data higher-spending PPC advertisers can access is significantly more valuable as it shows you the searches per month over the past 12 months, instead of a huge range. This presents a problem for any brand considering Share of Search if they aren’t a high-spending PPC advertiser or can’t access the account of one.

Choosing your brand rivals

When we work with new brands, we ask them about their rivals and they often list the big names in their sector but rarely bring up those who are winning digitally. In my experience, most sectors will have different winners offline and online.

It’s easy to pick the main competitors when doing Share of Search for mammoth brands like car companies, airlines or mobile phones. However, for many categories, the rivals are less visible, especially when you mix brick-and-mortar retailers with e-commerce businesses.

One of our clients, a bed retailer has never spent on any offline advertising like TV or radio. They have no physical stores. Yet they are one of the biggest bed retailers in the UK thanks to their digital activity. It’d never feature in a traditional brand study but when it comes to considering search activity and market share, their rivals need to consider them.

With this in mind, I would recommend looking at both your tired and tested real-world rivals and brands that are doing well online when choosing competitors and tracking how much their brands are growing or shrinking in value.

Look at who else is appearing for the keywords you want to target, look at who is bidding on your brand, and include them in your analysis. Avoid comparing apples with oranges by doing a Share of Search report for the brand as a whole, and another version just for digital rivals to see how it compares online.

Data gathering with Liberty

I hope this blog gives you a better understanding of Share of Search, and how you can choose and refine the data available to you.

Share of Search is not just a great way to see how healthy your brand is, it’s also bringing various people from across the marketing and advertising worlds together and discussing digital insights and the value of this kind of data, which is always a good thing. Find out more about us and our SEO agency right now.