What is Share of Voice?

What is Share of Voice?

It’s only logical to think that all marketers out there want their campaign to succeed. Running an efficient marketing and PR campaign can boost your site’s rankings and authority on SERPs.

So, how can you measure that success? One way to do so is by calculating your brand’s Share of Voice. This refers to the number of times it is mentioned in relevant conversations. It’s a great way to measure your brand’s visibility in diverse advertising/publishing channels, how much you dominate the market, and how it compares against your competitors.

With all the recent updates from search engines, calculating this data is easier than before. People rely on it to optimize their websites and make sure they stand out among the crowd.

While this metric is mostly used to explain a brand’s paid advertising market share, it can also include other elements of advertising and digital marketing such as social media mentions or keyword-specific traffic.

If you want to know your brand’s share of paid advertising, you can calculate Share of Voice with the following formula:

Share of Voice (SOV) = Brand/Product Advertising / Total Market Advertising

Usually, you would estimate this by considering impressions. They are counted every time your ad is shown on a search engine results page.

A more general formula could be:

Your brand’s metric / Total market metric x 100

You could use branded hashtags for social media measurement. For example, let’s say your hashtag is used or shows up 50 times, while the total of branded hashtags in your niche is 100. This means your SOV for social media in your market is 50%. Other metrics you can use to calculate Share of Voice include:

  –  Organic keywords

  –  Pay per click (PPC) keywords

  –  Revenue

  –  Mentions

  – Others

A big part of your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts should go towards competitor analysis. Here, you identify what other websites within your niche are doing right (and wrong) and what gaps there are in their content. By gathering this information, you get a sense of what you can optimize on your own website and fill in the areas that they are not exploiting. SOV is a great metric to do this.

Performing this process all by yourself can be daunting and challenging. Manually calculating SOV can take too much of your time, and let’s be honest; time is money. That’s why there are some SEO toolsets out there you can use to do it instead. These include Sycara and Brightedge. They have a built-in Share of Voice analysis tool to make your work easier.

When calculating SOV, you consider the total amount of impressions, links, and/or rankings. A useful measurement should also track actions throughout all channels. These include:

  –  Hyperlinks that are generating traffic to your site.

  – Time spent by users on a page after a specific link.