What is Digital Share of Voice in the Marketplace?
One insight I think is very helpful and should be included in all Media/Website Dashboards is what I call ‘digital share of voice’. Since we as marketers do not know how much our competitors are spending online (Search & Display advertising), one method that can shed some light is pulling traffic data from Compete.com. Compete is a powerful tool that can show you traffic and engagement metrics for practically any website. It does a variety of things like analyzing competitor keywords, identify site for affiliate and SEO link building, and helps uncover sources of traffic and more.
So back to online share of voice in the market, what I like to do for my clients is not only compare unique visitor data to competitors (as shown in the example above using Heineken and other beers), but get an idea of how effective and how much budget my competitors are spending in the online advertising space. By simply pulling unique visitor traffic, we can then compare the percentage of ‘online share of voice’
of your client’s brand to its competitors. As you can see from the example above, Heineken was clearly kicking butt in May and June as it had the largest percentage of digital traffic. Corona likely ran some sort of online marketing campaign in August or just spent a huge load of money in paid search. Looking at October and November, Budlight.com seems to be taking over 1st place as it is now ahead of Heineken in terms of internet share of voice.
Okay, this is cool, but what more is this telling us?
Well for one thing, if your clients think they can get away with spending less in digital or think that offline media is enough to generate website traffic, the digital share of voice chart is a good indicator to show if their decision making was right or wrong as we know as analysts that paid search and online display have the highest correlation with website traffic.
There is much more you can do with Compete Pro, especially if you would like to analyze how your competitors are using search. Feel free to also download my free tutorials on how to use data analysis to forecast online conversions, calculate target rate points for digital, optimize beyond CTR, CPC, & CPA and more.
Eric Melchor
Share of voice, while acceptable for brand advertisers, doesn’t equate to “intent” as all visitors to site are not of equal quality when comparing competitors.
How does one, using the open source/free tools that are available, approximate a relative competitive standing of share of “intent”?
You ask a very good question. I’m afraid there may never be a solution since all websites are not equal. For example, one competitive website may have visitors who spend twice the amount of time on their site versus another, but that could be because they have a fun game that visitors can play with. I suppose one method would be to look at the number of ‘store locator’ hits, but that would mean that every competitor would have to have such a tool on their website and displayed on the site exactly as its competitors. Then you (or Compete.com) would have to figure out how to retrieve this data. I don’t see this happening.
How does one meausre spend on digital media and share of voice in the digital media area. If a vendor spends X amount for 2010 what percentage of awareness is out there and is there a correlation? And can this kind of information be segmented for a particular industry? Are there agencies out there who can provide this kind of data and is it credible?
Hi Robert. It’s impossible to calculate digital media share of voice since every day more and more websites and social media pages are generated. With paid search however, it’s possible. I believe Google already has tools available in Adwords that provide this type of information. Thanks.