Share of Search

A brand's share of category-related search volume, used as a fast and free leading indicator of market share.

Les Binet, presented at IPA EffWorks Global (2020)

What it does

Gives a weekly read on brand health for nothing, in categories where a quarterly tracker costs a great deal and arrives too late to act on. Binet's analysis found it moving ahead of market share by several months across the categories tested, which makes it the rare brand metric that is both cheap and early.

When it breaks

It is a proxy, and proxies drift from what they proxy. Search volume rises with newsworthiness as well as with demand, so a crisis and a successful campaign look the same. In categories where buying does not involve search, or where the brand name is also an ordinary word, the signal is mostly noise. And because it is cheap to move — brand-name bidding, PR spikes — it degrades the moment it becomes a target, which is the standard Goodhart path.

Case

Binet presented share of search to EffWorks Global 2020 as a fast, cheap, predictive measure of brand health, showing it leading market share by a matter of months in the categories analysed. The IPA published the session as a new practical metric for effectiveness tracking.

IPA — Binet presents the share of search metric, EffWorks Global 2020 ↗

Diagram — not yet drawn

Two lines on one time axis, share of search and market share, with the horizontal offset between the same turning points marked as the lead time — and a second panel where a PR spike moves only one of the lines.

In the wild

Unvetted · not part of the tier assessment

What has been written about this tool in the last twelve months. Machine-retrieved and unchecked — everything above this line was checked.

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