There’s a lot of buzz around Share of Search at the moment. People, particularly those in the ad industry, are excited about this measurement metric, with some camps even suggesting that it is will replace Share of Voice.

 

That’s why the PR industry decided to take a closer look. Speaking at the AMEC Virtual Global Summit on Measurement, James Crawford, Managing Director, PR Agency One and Stella Bayles, Director, AnswerThePublic and CoverageBook, present the findings of a new discussion paper developed with the PRCA’s Innovation Panel. The aim – to find out just how valuable Share of Search can be for PR.

 

But what is it? Share of Search is a way to measure your share of brand awareness. It might – and James is careful to emphasise ‘might’ – strongly correlate to market share.

 

Share of Search indicates the number of times a brand is typed into a search engine, divided by the number of times all brands in its category are typed into a search engine. In other words, how many searches does your brand have vs the competition?

 

How is it done? Invest in a good keyword research tool; download the keywords into excel; then create a table to divide the number of brand-specific searches by the total for the category.

 

Considering the advantages of Share of Search, James comments: “It’s a powerful metric. It’s a good predictor of share of the market. It’s very useful for quick analysis of what the market looks like and also provides useful intelligence into brand awareness and seasonality, and into the entire category as well. It’s dead simple to do.”

 

But there are some serious reservations. There’s no opportunity for sentiment analysis, so crisis can actually increase your Share of Search. Smaller brands will struggle as they won’t have enough search volume to measure. And what about brands with generic names, like investment company Nutmeg?

 

“Nutmeg’s a spice, so around Christmas there’s a big spike in the number of searches for nutmeg, and they’re not looking for the investment company.”

 

So, Share of Search is no silver bullet. But it can be very effective when used as part of wider frameworks such as AMEC’s Integrated Measurement Framework.

 

Considering the value of Share of Search for PR, Stella is complimentary: “Whether we’re looking at how people are searching for brands or things they’ve been made aware of, adding search data as part of your insight phase has to be part of the framework. What we’re trying to do is understand whether we’ve made an impact, and you can get to that through search data. It’s available for free and it’s at our fingertips.”

 

To find out more about the PRCA Innovation Forum’s discussion paper, Beyond Share of Search: What Matters for PR, click here.