What is Share of Voice and why is it important?
The Share of Voice (SOV) describes how high the visibility of a brand or product is compared to its competitors in the digital context. It serves as an indicator of how much a company dominates an industry and how large its market share is. The higher your Share of Voice, the greater your popularity and presence with customers is likely to be.
Companies that know their Share of Voice therefore have a better understanding of their position in the market and their role in the competitive environment.
How is the Share of Voice calculated?
The percentage of mentions of a brand can be determined with the following formula. Here, the percentage of the SOV of a brand (X) is put in relation to the competitors (Y and Z):
(Number of mentions of brand X / Total number of mentions of all brand names (X+Y+Z)) x 100 = Share of Voice in %
Example: If your brand name is displayed 30 times, compared to 50 total brand mentions, then you have a SOV of 60%. However, this calculation is only linear (more on this in the chapter "Easily determine the Share of Voice with BidX").
Advantages of Share of Voice
To be successful as a company in the long term, you have to stay one step ahead of the competition and, above all, recognize potential opportunities and threats in time. Share of Voice can help you to do just that.
With the help of the Share of Voice, important questions for your company can be answered, such as:
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How visible is my brand to (potential) customers?
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How effective are my advertisements?
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How visible are my competitors?
As a seller, you should use these insights to optimize your ad campaigns. For example, if you notice that your competitors are not running ads on certain long-tail keywords, you can target your campaigns accordingly and fill the spots. You should try to target niches and strengthen your SOV for your most relevant keywords. You can also use the SOV to evaluate the success of your marketing efforts. For example, when you launch a campaign, you can determine if your SOV increases as a result. This is an indicator that your campaign is successful and your awareness is increasing. Based on this, you can also optimize other campaigns and continuously increase your visibility in the market.
The Share of Voice on Amazon
Share of Voice also plays an important role on Amazon. When someone searches for a keyword relevant for your brand on Amazon, you as a company want to know what percentage of the visible space you can occupy with your products. When you look at your Share of Voice on Amazon, you can also include different levels, such as brand visibility or product visibility.
According to Amazon, a higher SOV in most cases is also associated with increasing advertising expenses. Due to the enormous competition on Amazon, it has become almost impossible to successfully market products without placing ads. However, the high level of competition also drives up click prices. At the same time, with the same advertising budget, the number of impressions and clicks is decreasing from year to year, as more and more sellers are "fighting" for advertising space. With the help of the SOV, you can evaluate the performance of your Amazon advertising campaigns, such as Sponsored Product Ads (Attention: Just because your SOV does not increase significantly due to ads, this does not necessarily mean that the ads are bad. This also depends on what specific goal you are pursuing with the ad). What you can definitely determine with the SOV is whether the presence of your brand or product has increased as a result of your ads.
Easily determine the Share of Voice with BidX
Since it requires an enormous effort to manually calculate the Share of Voice for different keywords and products, the BidX tool now offers the possibility to calculate the Share of Voice.
Various settings can be made here:
- Should the organic or the paid results be considered?
- Which marketplace should be considered?
- How many results should be examined (the first 20, the first 40, etc.)?
- How many days should be analyzed?
- Which keywords should be tracked (e.g. laptop, notebook)?
- Which tracking type should be used? Here you can distinguish between brand and product. If you select "Brand", each product of your brand will be "counted" for the specified keywords and set in relation to the other brands. If you select Products, for example, you can select two of your products and see what percentage of visibility out of all results these two products have for your selected keywords.
- Which competitor brands should be considered?
- How should the calculation be done? Here you can distinguish between linear and weighed. In the linear approach, only the number of placements is counted. If 50 of 100 positions are occupied by your products, your Share of Voice is 50%. If you set weighted, then each placement counts differently. This means that the higher your product is displayed, the higher this value is included for the Share of Voice. So if you have the first 50 placements on a page, then the SOV is higher than if you have the last 50 placements.
Important: The Share of Voice feature is more relevant for larger companies that have a certain number of products for a keyword set in the search results.
At the current time (March 2023), the feature is therefore only enabled for Enterprise customers in the closed beta version. As an Enterprise customer, you get a free quota of 100 keywords that you can use individually. You can also buy additional keywords at any time.
As a non-Enterprise customer you can also activate the feature and buy keywords.
