Share of Voice, the percentage of a brand’s visibility in the marketplace
The share of voice is one of the basic metrics of marketing and digital advertising, because it measures the visibility of a brand within a market and compared to competitors. This percentage value can also be useful for SEO and, in general, it is useful to know how to calculate the share of voice on different channels to understand the evolution of our brand and its position in the perception of users.
What is the Share of Voice or SOV
Let’s start from definitions: the share of voice or SOV is the measurement of the weight of a given brand within a reference market, and therefore a metric that estimates the percentage of visibility of the brand compared to the total media exposure of all competitors.
It is thus a metric that estimates the percentage of brand visibility relative to the total media exposure of all competitors, and it gives us an immediate understanding of how much of the conversation in our industry is ours. Basically, share of voice therefore helps us understand how popular our brand is compared to all the other voices present.
Originally, the term was associated with the share of advertising space or time a company bought in traditional media. In the digital context, SOV has transformed to embrace not only paid advertising, but also organic presence on search engines, social media and in other forms of online communication.
Make your “voice” louder
What the SOV is for and why it matters
In a nutshell, this metric helps to understand how much a brand is present in the minds of consumers and how much space it occupies in the dialogue of its industry.
In fact, SOV measures the “noise” a brand generates in the marketplace, considering various aspects such as frequency of online mentions, presence in search results, engagement on social media, and reach of paid advertising. It is also a versatile metric that we can use in a competitive analysis focused on social media, organic traffic or even paid advertising. Besides being useful in its own right, then, various studies have shown that the value of SOV for a brand tends to be correlated with its market share and revenue.
The idea behind Share of Voice is simple: a brand that has a greater presence in the minds of the public is also likely to have greater consumer recognition and preference. Therefore, the basic goal should be to increase SOV share to improve one’s market position.
Knowing the Share of Voice of one’s brand or otherwise of the brand they are working for is essential for marketers, brand managers, market analysts, and communication strategy managers. It is also useful for investors and stakeholders who wish to assess the health and strength of a brand in the marketplace, as well as for SEO professionals and content managers, who can gain insights to leverage in optimizing content strategies and understanding online competitive dynamics.
In summary, SOV is a valuable metric that serves to assess a brand’s visibility relative to its direct competitors, providing an estimate of the effectiveness of its communication and marketing strategies. In addition, its monitoring makes it possible to measure brand awareness (intuitively, a high SOV indicates that the brand is known and recognized in the market), to monitor competitors (by comparing competitor percentages to understand how we position ourselves in the market and whether we need to increase visibility), and to assess the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, to see if they are yielding the desired results.
However, there are two aspects that should not be overlooked. First, SOV is only one of many metrics from to evaluate the performance of marketing strategies. More importantly, Share of Voice is a relative indicator: it makes no sense to look only at its absolute value of, but it is important to compare it with that of competitors to analyze the market scenario as a whole.
The history of SOV, from pre-digital marketing to new developments
The concept of Share of Voice developed gradually as the advertising industry and market research evolved and has its roots in the traditional advertising of the 1950s and 1960s, when television and radio were the main advertising channels and companies were beginning to recognize the importance of measuring their presence against competitors.
At that time, SOV was measured primarily through manual analysis of ad spending and audience reached data: relatively simply, the volume of ad space or airtime purchased by a brand was compared with the total ad space available. It was thus a direct measure of advertising investment and its ability to cover the market.
With the advent of the Internet and the digitization of marketing, the concept of SOV has greatly expanded, gaining complexity and facets. The spread of the Web and social media has multiplied the channels through which a brand can express itself, and thus the measurement of SOV has become more articulated, but also richer in insight: it is no longer limited to traditional advertising, but includes a variety of online channels, from organic search results (SEO), to social media, to content marketing, to PPC (Pay Per Click) and beyond. In addition, digital SOV considers not only quantity, but also the quality of exposure, such as user engagement and brand resonance as elements included in the evaluation.
SOV digital advertising, the evolution of the metric
Traditionally, SOV has been applied to the advertising world, expressing as a percentage the advertising value (in print, radio or TV) held by a brand in a market or market segment compared to all competitors in the niche, defined in terms of expenses, pages, sites, posters and so on.
In fact, the share is often studied in terms of advertising investments in relation to total investments in the reference sector, even if in this sense we speak more precisely of share of spending.
With the evolution of marketing and digital advertising, Share of Voice has also begun to be used to monitor visibility in organic channels such as social media and research, thus measuring the weight of the brand in relation to the total of the media exposure and mentions.
Marketing SOV, definition of the metric
And so, nowadays the term has a broader meaning and includes all measurable forms of brand awareness, such as the number and scope of online mentions, PPC, website traffic and more.
Digital marketing allows more accurate calculations, as it is much easier to determine and monitor online competitors; therefore, using the right tools and with the appropriate information it is not difficult to calculate the SOV of our brand.
In this context, therefore, the Share of Voice of an organization can be defined as the share of conversations generated around brands, products or services monitored within different communication channels, such as search engines (studying for example SEO positioning and CTR on content according to specific keyword), news sites, blogs, forums, social media and offline channels, compared to its direct competitors.
We can therefore think of SOV as a useful indicator for a competitive analysis, which can be broken down and detailed to monitor the weight of the brand on specific topics, geographical regions and languages, so as to perfect our strategy.
How to calculate the share of voice
The calculation of Share of Voice in digital marketing can be done through different methods, depending on the channels considered. For online advertising, for example, it can be calculated as the ratio of a brand’s advertising impressions to the total number of impressions in its industry; for social media, it can be considered the number of mentions of a brand compared to the total mentions of its competitors, or the percentage of engagement (likes, comments, shares) of a brand compared to that of its competitors. In SEO, a brand’s visibility in search results is analyzed by comparing the frequency and position of its appearances with those of its competitors.
Regardless of the area of marketing we are focusing on, the general formula for calculating share of voice is:
SOV = Brand Visibility Value / Total Market Visibility Value.
It follows that if a company has a SOV of 20 percent, it means that its brand or product is mentioned or seen 20 percent of the time when its target industry is mentioned.
The value and measures used to calculate SOV depend on our goals and the metrics best suited to measure visibility in the target channel.
Some digital marketing tools may be needed to calculate values across channels, and the use of advanced analytical tools is essential to collect and interpret the necessary data.
We will now try to understand how to measure SOV in social media and blogs, online media releases, PPC and Google.
Share of voice on Social Media
Mentions on social media are often considered the only “real” share of voice metric, because it allows you to measure the voice of customers.
Social media allows us to find out how often people talk about our brand organically, and there are two ways to calculate this type of share of voice: manually and with a paid social listening tool.
The first method, as Anna Bredava explains on Search Engine Journal, still requires to use a media monitoring tool – but there are also free ones – to calculate the number of mentions for each competitor and more advanced analytics as scope, sentiment, influencers and more.
In summary, the work to measure the SOV in social media consists in annotating the total number of mentions of our brand and that for direct competitors, and then perform a formula:
(number of mentions of our brand / total number of mentions of brands (our + that of competitors) x 100 = SOV
This method is useful when we need a quick evaluation of the share of voice, but it has its disadvantages, because it is not very precise, does not cover all social media networks, does not provide detailed statistics, gives us no way to track changes in the share of voice over time and see growth patterns.
More precise in this is the use of a social listening tool, which allows you to create an alert system for all brands and compare insights. A social listening alert – social listening alert – is essentially a keyword or a set of keywords, such as (in this particular case) the brand name and its variants (social media handle).
The tools allow us to deepen the main differences between us and our competitors, such as the platforms that work best for them, which brand has a greater share of positive and negative mentions, who is more popular and where, which influencers talk about it.
Share of voice within media
If the previous one is the voice of the users and the customer, the share of voice in the media could be defined as the metric of the “sector voice“, because it shows how consolidated our brand is in the eyes of industry experts and peers.
The SOV calculation for online media is particularly useful for evaluating our public relations and content strategies and finding new outlets to focus on.
Most social listening tools also allows scanning of news websites and blogs, so we can also use the same tool to calculate the share of voice in the media: the workflow is practically the same, only by limiting the sources of mentions only to news and sector blogs.
Share of voice for the PPC
Traditionally the share of voice was used to calculate the share of advertising, so it is logical that digital marketers measure the share of voice in the PPC.
Fortunately, this calculation is easy, because you only need to check the statistics of Google Ads.
The metric equivalent to the share of voice PPC is the share of impressions (the percentage of impressions that ads receive compared to the total number of impressions that they might get), visible in the Campaigns tab of the Google Ads account.
The formula used by Google to calculate the share impressions is:
Share of impressions = total suitable impressions/impressions
Appropriate impressions are calculated on the basis of various elements, such as targeting settings, approval status, other participants in the same auctions as the advertisements, and the quality and share data impressions are available for campaigns, ad groups, product groups (in Shopping campaigns) and keywords.
The SEO share of voice, namely Google’s share
In our industry, as well, has spread the use of this metric, which is called SEO share of voice, share of topic or, in some cases, share of Google: namely, the share of voice in organic search, an analysis showing which websites rank most frequently for a given set of keyword or topic in organic search.
This type of exercise helps website owners to better understand the competitive pressures in search engines, as well as to identify opportunities for link building, content creation and social media.
How to calculate SOV in the organic search
There are various systems to measure the SEO SOV, and this in particular is divided into 3 simple steps.
- Choice of main topics
First, we need to identify the target group of topics for which our site should position itself, using:
- Analysis of the personas.
- Mapping of the customer journey for each persona.
- Interviews with current and potential customers, partners and actual sales representatives to validate the research.
- Content gap analysis to identify uncovered keywords.
After completing this step, we must elaborate 3-5 initial main arguments that align with each of the personas and each stage of the respective buyer’s journey.
- Verification of ranking in the topic
The next step is to locate the domains placed on the first page of Google for each of these topics, using Seozoom as a reference for data and exporting the results.
The advice is to locate rankings for at least 15-30 keywords, so you get a wider set of domains and topics.
- Creation of a pivot tab
At this point, we enter the domain data into a pivot table to see how many times a domain has been ranked into a given set of arguments.
The SEO Share of Voice will be the number of times our brand ranks divided by the number of total domains that are classified on Google.
The article of smartbugmedia also offers an example of analysis for illustrative purposes, which examines four topics related to the topic “construction management software”, with table and graphic representation of the Google Share of Voice of brands that rank most frequently for these keywords.
This type of analysis opens a door that will help us to understand what can be needed to earn a wider share of topic in our industry.
In this specific case, software review sites such as Capterra and Softwareadvice.com have a greater share of voice than individual software brands, industry news or social media sites; so if we were a small software brand, it would be better to focus efforts on improving ad placement within those software review sites (via a greater number of 5-star reviews), because trying to overcome competitively placed review sites for certain topics on Google might be pointless and wasteful.
Beyond SOV: SEOZoom’s Traffic Share
If our intent is to analyze more specifically the SEO voice of our site (or that of a competitor) we can use one of the latest metrics introduced by SEOZoom, namely Traffic Share.
Traffic Share in fact offers an in-depth view of the distribution of web traffic generated by a set of related searches, i.e., a cluster of keywords that share the same search intent. This tool goes beyond analyzing the ranking of a single keyword, providing a percentage overview of how traffic is distributed among various competitors for a given topic or theme.
In this way we can identify which domain is capturing the most traffic for a group of search terms, thus indicating which competitor has developed the most effective content in Google’s eyes. Traffic Share allows us to assess not only who is dominating for a specific keyword-just check the position in SERPs! – but goes further and shows who really has the strongest and most authoritative presence in the entire thematic context and therefore collects the largest share of traffic, thus extending the analysis not only to the main keyword or keyword of interest, but to the whole related set.
Why the share of voice metric is important
Digital marketing has not only opened up many exciting new ways to promote our brands and products, but it has also increased the number of metrics we need to monitor, often making it difficult to really understand where we stand with our brand.
The share of voice helps precisely this, because it shows us the position of our company on the market and can be a great starting point to map our industry and discover complete insights on the competition.
More specifically, it tells us where our brand is currently located, where it could be and how to get there, while providing a reference to compare our success with that of competitors.
In addition, the metric can become useful in many marketing areas, to improve investments and efforts in this field, and in particular in the aspects described below, that represent only a handful of ways to use SOV as a first step to a complete market research.
- Brand management
Brand awareness is probably the first element that can be evaluated with the share of voice, because tracing the online mentions and the PPC we can see how many people know our brand, how many times they find it online and how much they talk about it.
- Campaign monitoring
The measurement of the share of voice must not be limited only to our brand: we can also calculate the SOV of multiple campaigns running on the market at the same time, drawing on different and specific insights of the public, segmented by country, language, social media platform and more.
Performing this analysis regularly will help us to understand what our audience finds favorable and from what elements of our competitors’ campaigns we could draw inspiration.
- Consumer Insights
Speaking of public favor, SOV monitoring can also help us uncover unexpected information about our consumers.
The online share of voice is based on the actual conversations and behavior of Internet users, as opposed to the traditional share of voice which is simply based on the number of ads, and so we can use the data to draw conclusions about our brand’s audience.
Exploring the specific conversations that take place around competitors’ brands can also provide inspiration for products and help us improve our company and strategy.
- Public relationships
Determining our share of voice in the news can show how effective our multimedia strategy is compared to that of competitors.
For example, by exploring the mentions from the media collected during the calculation of the share of voice we can find out if there are sources that cover the competitors but do not give space to us, or more generally what are the stories the media are interested in.
How to use the SEO share of voice to improve marketing strategies
Diving more into the details of SOV SEO, we can say that the identification of the weight of the brand in organic research allows us to have insights useful to improve our strategies in various aspects and, in particular, for content analysis – and indeed we also mentioned it about KPI content to verify the concrete results of our work.
Measure your SEO share of voice!
In this sense, we go study the types of content that the main competitors are creating and that help their positioning: we can first deepen the format of these contents (type, length, publication frequency) and information architecture, which is how competitors are structuring their product or editorial content – for example, using a Pillar content structure with well-organised internal links. In addition, we can also proceed to a topical analysis, identifying what are the types of topics on which they focus and how the contents that are positioned treat these topics, also highlighting the gaps on our site.
More generally, then, the analysis of the share of voice SEO allows us to identify opportunities for the link building – discovering which sites link the main competitors but not us and trying to intercept them – and wider SEO opportunities. By examining all the listings in the SERP (both paid and organic), we can find out if paid ads push out the organic listings: in this case, faced with a low opportunity to classify us organically for this given set of topics due to overwhelming organic and paid competition, the SEO may not be the best channel on which you should invest compared to other forms of marketing.
Conclusions on the share of voice
Compared to the past, the share of voice is a much more complex metric, but also much more useful.
Calculating the SOV for different areas of our digital marketing strategy and segmenting it further based on data analytics we can derive more than one starting point for the business strategy. We get, that is, an in-depth look at the current state of affairs for our company and the market in general.
This information will support the brand, products and marketing decisions, and SOV’s ongoing monitoring over time will demonstrate the impact of these decisions and our interventions.
