Share of search and keeping strategy alive: Your Marketing Week
This week it is my turn to offer a view on our key stories and what they mean for you and the industry. From going beyond the hype to analyse the potential for ‘share of search’, to lessons on keeping strategy alive, it’s been a busy week on marketingweek.com. Here is my take.
By Sarah Vizard
Searching for the answer
The concept of ‘share of search’ has been sending ripples of excitement across the marketing industry in recent months. A metric based on freely available Google Trends search data dating back to 2004, it is being touted as an accurate proxy for market share and potentially even a leading indicator for future growth.
It has some big industry names behind it. Our columnist Mark Ritson is a fan, suggesting that because it is further down the marketing funnel it could be “more predictive than share of voice”. Les Binet, affectionally referred to by many as the godfather of effectiveness, believes it is an indicator of brand salience and has found a strong correlation between the metric and share of market, particularly in categories such as automotive.
There are equally some who question its use. For example, it still requires accurately defining a category, which is one of the issues with share of voice.
