Sample frameDay 347·Marketing · Signals

Every number on your dashboard is a report on what already happened. There's a free one that runs ahead.

Marketing.

Share of Search

5 min read·Apply by lunch

The question

If your share of the market started slipping nine months from now, what would you be able to see between now and then — and is there a single instrument on your monthly pack that would move before the revenue did? I'll answer that one for you: no, which is why the first sign of trouble is usually a quarter you can no longer fix.

The idea

Share of search is exactly what it sounds like. Of all the searches made for brands in your category, it's the proportion that name you — and Google Trends gives it away for nothing. The measure was pushed into practice by the British strategist James Hankins and taken up by Les Binet, head of effectiveness at adam&eveDDB, who presented the analysis to the IPA in 2020. Binet tested it across three categories with almost nothing in common — cars, domestic energy and mobile handsets — and kept finding the same shape: share of search tracks share of market closely, and it moves first. The lead runs longest where buyers take longest, which in his set meant cars. He also traced the chain backwards. Advertising lifts share of search, and share of search lifts share of market. So you're holding two instruments at once: a forecast of where your sales are heading, and a read on whether last quarter's marketing did anything at all. It has almost nothing to do with your paid keywords. It's a measure of how often your name is the one that comes to mind.

The framework

01
One comparison, not five separate searches.
The rival set is already drawn: use the same names you settled on for share of voice, or the two measures are drawn round different categories and neither can be read against the other. What's specific to search is how you pull the figures. Enter every brand in that set as one Google Trends comparison — the tool takes five terms at a time and scales them all against a single peak, which is what caps the set at five — then divide your index by the total. Pull them as separate searches and each series is scaled to its own peak instead, so the ratio is arithmetic on numbers that share no unit, and it hands the smallest brand a share it hasn't got. Hold the constituents still afterwards, adding a new entrant only when it's real: comparability with your own past is what makes the measure worth having.
02
Brand searches, not category searches.
The series that leads sales counts people typing your name, not people typing what you sell. Generic terms measure category demand, which is useful and completely different; brand terms measure whether you've made it into somebody's head. Strip the noise out before you trust the line — brand names that mean other things, spikes caused by a news story or a namesake, your own staff and suppliers looking you up. Google Trends returns a relative index rather than absolute volume, and inside a single comparison that's fine: share is a ratio, so the units cancel out.
03
What does it look like when it goes wrong?
A leading indicator is worth exactly what the response behind it is worth. Chart share of search monthly on the same page as share of market, and write down now what a sustained fall means and who acts on it. A few points lost and held for a quarter is a signal; one bad month is weather. Set the threshold while nothing's wrong, because a declining line never arrives alone — it arrives with a plausible explanation attached, and somebody senior who is willing to supply it.
04
It also grades the money you spent last quarter.
Brand work is famously hard to judge on a quarterly clock, which is why it tends to lose the argument to anything that can be measured by Friday. Share of search sits in between: too slow to be gamed by a weekend promotion, fast enough to read while a campaign is still in market. Use it as the check on brand spending — are more people typing your name than before it ran — and watch your rivals' lines on the same chart. A competitor's share of search climbing is the cheapest early warning you'll ever get that somebody is spending against you.

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