Share of voice (SOV) essentially means comparing your crucial performance metrics against those of key competitors’. Which metrics are compared is up to the individual marketer and/or as preset in various SOV tools. It’s best to start by saying that share of voice means different things to different marketers.
Share Of Voice: A Core Definition
From social and SEO to PPC, there are two essential elements to calculating share of voice: a) you have to measure something and b) what you measure needs to be analyzed proportionally against competitors’ data to establish each party’s relative market share. Competitors’ data is not evenly available, either in the public domain or via purchased from third parties running data broker businesses. Not all analytics calculate SOV. What SOV means to you as a marketer is contingent on competitive data sets you believe to be most crucial.
“Share” is self-explanatory. It means percentage of something vs. competitors’ share. “Voice” is a little trickier because it implies that people are saying things. That’s not always the case when discussing SOV. For instance, publishers might consider “Voice” a focus on weight or percentage among advertisers on their website. PPC heroes consider impressions available to buy on a search or display engine as voice. To the SEO specialist, voice can mean available traffic an organic keyword can send. PR and social media practitioners view voice as public mentions, segmented by vertical (social, news, blogs, etc.) often filtered by sophisticated Boolean queries that associate brand terms with keywords.
This article will discuss essential elements of SOV for online advertisers, SEO, social media and holistic online marketers. The post is comprehensive, so feel free to jump to specific sections with the links below. Make sure to come back and read the rest of the post. We’ll delve into and provide insight into:
- Advertising Share Of Voice: Impression Share (Of Voice)
- SEO Share Of Voice
- Emergent SEO/PPC Competitive Gap Analysis
- Social Share Of Voice
- Big Data, Holistic, Multichannel, Competitive Share Of Voice, Spanning Search, Social, Mainstream Channels, Blogs, Forums, News. Â This is true share of voice in a way many marketers should think about SOV.
Tools Discussed: Sysomos MAP, AdGooroo, SpyFu Recon, SpyFu Kombat, BrightEdge, Conductor, Google AdWords, Majestic SEO, moz Open Site Explorer, SimplyMeasured
Boolean Queries: The Art & Genius Of SOV Segmentation
We’ll flesh out the indispensible concept of Boolean queries as applied to the front end of share of voice measurements. A fistful of clever Boolean queries definitely expedites competitive gap analysis. If you don’t know what “competitive gap analysis via SOV reports” means, then you’ll probably enjoy what is about to come. There is surprisingly little written on the topic of Boolean-query-powered SOV reports and how it affects various marketers’ roles.
Hey, Where’s That (Big) Data Come From?
Organic and advertising data comes from all different sources, some public and some commercial APIs.  From the Twitter fire hose and AdWords to YouTube, Facebook, Google Analytics, moz and Majestic SEO APIs, the data universe rocks these days. Other genius tools test engines’, blogs’ and platforms’ terms of services by scraping web pages and parsing them as RSS feeds. Tools like Adgooroo, SpyFu, Sysomos MAP and others aggregate public and private sources to form masterful datasets. The data universe, all the sources that can be called upon to understand share of voice, is part of what marketers call “Big data.” Start adding in amazingly filtered feeds from Sysomos Heartbeat (pre-vetted with MAP) and the whole SOV thing lights up like a Christmas tree.  Inject data from Conductor, BrightEdge, Recon, AdWords, Twitter, Facebook APIs and…others…and…you get the picture of what’s possible.
First Party VS Competitors’ Data
YOU, as a website owner, have access to all your data (first party). In Facebook, Google, Twitter, and most other engines and platforms, you have at least some private access to data about your own profile’s performance. Nobody else can access that special data. Your activities as a marketer in various channels also leave plenty of public data trails. Your competitors’ data also leaves a public trail. Any competitor’s public data trail can be mined for the purpose of measuring SOV. So can yours.  Sometimes it makes sense to use public data about your own website.
The bad news is that, for all the guile in the world, I simply can’t have access to my competitor’s profile’s first party (private) data. It’s problematic that my competitors have access to MY public trail.  However, all-in-all it’s great news that competitors can’t see MY first party data.  And, I can see competitors’ trails.  Suffice to say that the Internet is made of both public and private datasets, holding various metrics about yourself and others.  These sources can be scoured and mined to form share of voice.
Share of voice means curating public and private data to form a trended understanding of how we stack up against competitors for key metrics. From AdWords and SEO to complex multichannel SOV queries and reputation monitoring, Â SOV means many things to many marketers.
OK then! Let’s go on a magical share-of-voice-bus tour from the perspectives of advertisers, SEOs, social marketers, Boolean powered holistic monitoring query jocks and big data curation tool sharpshooters!
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