Measure Your Brand’s Online Share of Voice

What is Share of Voice?

Share of Voice (SOV) is traditionally a term involved in determining the advertising volume as compared to your competitors. This definition has extended to online visibility to measure your brand’s online share of voice across organic search, PPC (Pay Per Click), social media, blogs and articles generated through Public Relations.

Social media is the only platform that publishes ‘UGC’ (User Generated Content) to produce and measure ‘share of voice’, whereas PPC and organic search, their metrics commonly refer to ‘share of market’.

How does one Measure Your Brand’s Online Share of Voice?

In the past, calculating the share of voice was more of an approximation, where the ‘spend’ had to be estimated and competitor adverts were often missed.

An accurate measurement methodology allows you to gauge where your brands stands and how to improve the effectiveness of your communications strategy in the future.

Irrespective of the marketing mix you focus on, the calculation involves some variation of the original share of voice formula:

Your Brand Advertising / Total Market Advertising = Share of Voice

With the newer avenues of SEO, PPC and social media, there several tools that will calculate the SOV more accurately along with regular updates.

• Share of voice across Social Media Platforms are tracked by the number of times your brand is mentioned on all statistically significant social media channels
• It is not advisable to track mentions of your brand manually, instead subscribe to some paid tools like Hootsuite, Sproutsocial, Brandwatch etc. as they are cost effective and efficient in the long run
• To calculate organic search share of voice (SOV) manually:

Brand Traffic / Total Market Traffic = Share of Voice (data can be extracted from Google Analytics)

• You can also take the help of tools like Sysomos MAP, AdGooroo, SpyFu Recon, SpyFu Kombat, BrightEdge, Conductor, Google AdWords, Majestic SEO, Moz Open Site Explorer

• Share of voice equivalent for PPC can be extracted from Google AdWords called as ‘Impression Share’, this represents the percentage of times your ads were shown to users compared to the number of times your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings.

Having defined metrics and tools in place allows you to have a pulse on consumer preferences as well as established competitors and new entries into the market that are gaining momentum. Your brand’s success relies on a strong communications strategy and a feedback loop to ensure you stay current and effective.

Also, check out our blog on how to expand your share of voice.