Share of Search – More than just a metric

Share of search, a brand's share of the searches in its category, can be calculated for free from Google Trends and tracks market share remarkably closely. James Hankins of Vizer Consulting worked on the metric for seven or eight years, independently of Les Binet. When the two published in 2020, Marketing Week named them both Changemakers. In this talk he shows how to use share of search to diagnose a business, not just to report on it.

You'll learn how to choose the terms people actually search for, how to compare more than five brands in Google Trends and how to calculate share from 12-month averages. James explains why share of search must not be confused with share of voice and walks through five diagnostic techniques: validation against market data, S-curves, growth quadrants, investment in channel, and the gap between share of search and share of market. He illustrates them with UK comparison sites, tea, John Lewis, Next, Nike, cars and supermarkets.