When planning their advertising strategy, brands often aim to increase their market presence and how much people talk about them. Besides using market research and social listening to gauge how much the market is talking, is there a metric that gives brands an early sense of their share of voice while their ads are running? This post introduces the SOV metric and how to apply it in your advertising strategy.
What is SOV?
SOV (share of voice), or impression share, is the percentage of total impressions that a brand’s ads actually receive.
Impression share = impressions / total eligible impressions
The higher the SOV, the more likely consumers are to see the ad when their behaviour or tags match what the ad targets. But many brands share a concern: does a higher SOV mean the brand has to invest more resources? How do you strike a balance in marketing efficiency? Is there a clear benchmark for assessing how intensively to advertise?
Here CloudAD shares an easy-to-remember SOV formula that makes assessing SOV simple.
Building an SOV 3-5-8 strategy
When promoting products and services, brands usually first need to define how closely topics and customer groups relate to the brand, and then apply different levels of marketing effort. Understanding the idea behind the 3-5-8 rule gives brands a firmer basis for allocating resources. Google once proposed a “3-5-8 rule” for keyword strategy, where the three numbers represent the share of voice a brand should hold on topics of different importance. For the brand’s most important topics and features, SOV should reach 80%; for secondary topics, about 50%; and for outer-circle topics that build potential audiences, around 30%. The SOV strategy can be applied to many kinds of advertising. Below we use keyword ads and audience targeting as examples.
SOV strategy for keywords
Keyword groups are usually closely tied to the brand’s topics and are planned from closest to furthest. They are most often divided into brand terms, category/product terms, and consumer interest/need terms, with a different SOV benchmark for each group.
Brand terms
When users search for brand terms, such as the brand name or product/service terms that clearly identify the brand, it shows they already know something about the brand and want to find out more. It also means a high likelihood of conversion. Brand terms are also very easy for competitors to target. To make sure users see the brand’s ads when they search, we recommend aiming for 80% SOV to secure and defend brand traffic.
Product/category terms
When users search for product/category terms, it shows they are actively researching that type of product but do not yet intend to buy from a specific brand. To go after these potential customers, we recommend aiming for 50% SOV to broaden the brand’s sources of customers.
Consumer interest/need terms
When users search for interest or need terms, their intent towards a product category is not yet clear. This suggests they are more likely to be early in the purchase decision process, and they are harder to convert than users searching the brand terms and product/category terms above. We recommend brands decide whether to cover interest/need terms depending on their resources, and aim for 30% SOV to link the brand with specific needs and strengthen its image.
SOV strategy for audience targeting
As with keyword ads, when planning audience targeting you can work from the most relevant audiences outwards and use the SOV 3-5-8 rule to review performance. Take a cosmetics brand promoting a liquid foundation. Its audiences could be planned as follows:
- Core brand audience: brand members, website/app visitors, followers of the brand’s Facebook page
- Potential buyers: competitors’ fans, audiences interested in liquid foundation
- Broad interest groups: audiences interested in beauty and skincare
By looking at each audience’s size (TA size) and the reach achieved after the ads run, we can calculate the SOV for each audience. Applying the SOV 3-5-8 rule, we can then set an SOV target for each audience according to its importance, giving budget allocation a firmer basis in data.
However, the 3-5-8 rule is still a broad strategic guide. Detailed SOV targets need to be adjusted for factors such as the search volume of the terms the brand targets, audience size and the brand’s resources. If keyword search volume is high, the audience is large and the brand’s budget is limited, you can try relaxing the SOV targets; otherwise, you can put more effort into the outer-circle targets. Before setting a strategy, confirm the scope of your target market and assess the resources you have. Only then can you set growth targets that suit the brand’s current situation and improve marketing performance.
Three ways to improve SOV
1. Increase the average daily ad budget
Whether the ad budget is sufficient determines how many impressions the ads receive, and so how high the SOV is. Increasing the budget effectively reduces the impression share lost to budget, which in turn increases impression share.
2. Raise bids
Raising bids makes ads more competitive in the auction, so they win more opportunities to be shown. You can adjust bids using competitor analysis reports or by watching ad costs and spend, to make your bids more reasonable.
3. Improve ad quality
Besides budget and bids, an ad’s Quality Score is an important factor in how the system decides whether to show a brand’s ads. If the Quality Score is low, you can improve it by optimising factors such as landing page experience, ad relevance and expected click-through rate.
We hope this introduction to SOV and its strategic uses helps brands optimise their ads and review performance with a clearer direction. If you need help or have questions about planning your advertising strategy, get in touch.
