Share of Voice in Retail Media: Your Ultimate Guide [2024]

Reading time: 14 minutes

Metrics like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) are a classic way to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns but knowing how efficiently you’re spending your ad budget doesn’t tell you anything about how you’re performing against the competition. To fully optimize your retail media strategy, you need a keen eye on your competitors. This is where Share of Voice (SOV) comes in. SOV in retail media is fast becoming one of the most critical KPIs for eCommerce advertisers, as it measures your brand’s visibility in a marketplace relative to your competitors for the keywords you’re investing in. It can also be viewed as a predictor of ROAS. In this ultimate guide to Share of Voice in Retail Media for 2024, we’ll explain:

What is Share of Voice and why you should be tracking it alongside ROAS and other KPIs
How to calculate SOV, including specifics for retailers like Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart
Best practices and essential tools for tracking SOV
How to use SOV to outmaneuver your competition

Share of Voice (SOV) is a marketing metric that measures the percentage of a brand’s market share relative to its competitors. This could be in social media, a marketplace, or in this case in digital advertising. Retail Media Share of Voice specifically refers to how visible your brand is across Organic and paid media compared to your competitors. Essentially, SOV in retail media serves as a strong indicator of how much of the available ad real estate your brand occupies on a retailer’s platform. Whether you’re selling on Amazon, Walmart, Instacart, or across multiple retailers, SOV provides a crucial measure of your advertising visibility and prominence. It allows you to assess critical success factors, particularly:

Advertising Presence: How many of your advertisements appear in relation to the total amount of advertisements in a specific category or retailer. This could include display ads, sponsored product listings, search ads, and other forms of digital media.
Competitive Benchmarking: Compare your performance against the competition and your internal targets on retailers like Amazon where you’re competing for visibility. For example, if you have a 30% share of voice on Amazon, it means that 30% of all advertising impressions within the relevant category belong to you.
Impact on Market Share: The more visible you are to shoppers, the more likely you are to dominate the category.
Strategic Allocation: Discover where and how to allocate your advertising budgets in the most effective way. A lower SOV might indicate a need for increased investment in a particular channel or platform to improve competitiveness.

The key difference between Share of Voice (SOV) and Share of Shelf (SOS) boils down to different sources of traffic; paid or organic. SOV primarily measures your brand’s visibility through paid traffic, while SOS encompasses both organic and paid traffic. Specifically:

Share of Voice (SOV) refers to the percentage of market visibility your brand achieves through organic search and paid advertising. It reflects how much you’re investing in sponsored products, brands, and video ads to dominate the paid space on retailer platforms. With Pacvue, you can filter between Organic and Paid SoV to get a more granular understanding of your marketshare.
Share of Shelf (SOS), on the other hand, represents the percentage of market visibility your brand achieves through both paid and organic traffic. It depends not only on your ad spend but also on how well your products rank organically. This makes SOS a more comprehensive measure of your brand’s overall presence on the digital shelf.

This distinction is crucial because SOV gives you insight into how effectively you’re leveraging paid media, whereas SOS provides a broader view of your brand’s overall market positioning, factoring in both paid efforts and organic performance.

You can think of SOV as a pie chart that shows how much of the advertising “pie” your brand controls compared to your competitors. In other words, it’s your brand’s portion of the total advertising presence in a specific market or category.

Share of Voice (SOV) = (Your Brand’s Ad Impressions (or Spend, Clicks, etc)) / Total Ad Impressions (or Spend, Clicks, etc.) in the Market x 100

Suppose you’re running an ad campaign for a new product on Amazon. Over a month, your ads were shown 1,000 times. During the same period, all brands combined had a total of 10,000 ad impressions in your product category.

So, your Share of Voice would be:

SOV = (1,000)/(10,000) x 100 = 10%

This means your brand captured 10% of all the ad impressions in for that keyword, indicating how visible your brand was compared to others.

The previous example focused on impressions, but it’s important to note that SOV isn’t just a single metric—it’s a suite of metrics that reflect various aspects of competitive performance and visibility. This versatility is what makes SOV so valuable. One of the key strengths is that SOV for both you and your competitors can be calculated in multiple ways. The concept can be applied to impressions, clicks, traffic, sales, and more. With SOV you can gain a high-level overview of your brand’s overall performance, or drill down for a detailed analysis of individual products or specific campaigns. You can assess overall search terms and then drill down into paid vs. organic SOV, analyze different keywords, and explore consumer demographics.

Hopefully you’re now getting to grips with just how valuable and versatile SOV is, and how tedious and time-consuming it would be to calculate it manually on an ongoing basis. That’s why we’ve built Share of Voice tracking into our Pacvue Commerce platform, because the real value in Share of Voice comes from tracking this metric on an ongoing basis. Let’s look at the kind of insights you can get when you automate SOV tracking and how SOV can inform your decision making.

The great thing about measuring SOV is that it’s not just limited to your own brand, you can perform a competitive analysis on a market-wide scale and use those insights to optimize your ad strategy. Gain intelligence such as:

The types of campaigns your competitors are focusing on
Which keywords your competitors are bidding on
Daily changes to your paid and organic SOV

By tracking SOV in this way, you can identify competitor strategies that are harming your visibility.

For example, we did this for D2C mattress startup, Tuft & Needle, who used SOV tracking through Pacvue Commerce to troubleshoot a sudden spike in their CPC. They discovered that a competitor was targeting their branded keywords and running a 25% off promotion to seize their customers.

With SOV, brands like Tuft & Needle can discover competitor campaign strategies, and identify gaps. SOV can also be used to track organic and paid share of voice before and after any CPC spikes to understand why they are happening and what you can do to prevent them.

Share of Voice is an invaluable tool for prioritizing your ad spending across keywords, campaigns, and retailers by highlighting areas where your brand is underrepresented and where you may need to allocate more budget to specific keywords and categories. Additionally, monitoring SOV allows you to see the impact of your current ad spend on your market share, helping you make informed decisions that maximize ROAS by focusing investments on where they yield the best results.

SOV can also help you prioritize ad spend across retailers. Consider this example from one of the brands we work with in the consumer electronics category. On Amazon, which we know to be highly competitive, we found that 84 brands were actively vying for attention across the top 10 keywords in the category, with none capturing more than 10% of the paid SOV. This shows a highly fragmented market where ad visibility is evenly spread out among many competitors. On the other hand, the same keyword analysis on Walmart showed a stark contrast, with only two brands actively participating, and one brand dominating over 90% of the paid SOV.

The key takeaway? In this case, the competitive landscape on Walmart was far less crowded than on Amazon. This presented a prime opportunity to prioritize their ad spending on Walmart, where they could secure a larger SOV with less competition. They acted quickly to capitalize on the relatively low competition on Walmart and allow the brand time to establish a strong presence before the market became more saturated. And of course, they continue to monitor SOV for other brands that recognize the potential and enter the space.

We know that retailer search algorithms, especially Amazon’s, are heavily influenced by the volume of product sales. This means the more your product sells on Amazon, the more visible your product will become in organic search. In this way, paid ads can cause a boost in sales that lead to an increase in organic search rank, hence a halo effect. This is why we advocate tracking both paid and organic SOV so you can have visibility over which campaigns contribute to an organic Halo effect.

We recently helped a leading global beauty brand enhance its organic visibility on Amazon by implementing a targeted SOV strategy. The brand aimed to increase its first-page SOV for the highly competitive search term “mascara” across multiple sub-brands, without significantly increasing its paid advertising spend. By strategically increasing keyword bids by 60% when the brand’s products were not appearing prominently and by optimizing placements for top-of-search and top-of-page positions, we successfully boosted the brand’s presence. Additionally, we made ASIN-specific bid adjustments to focus on high-volume, new, and underperforming products, ensuring these items gained more visibility and higher rankings in search results.

The results were significant, with a 36% increase in organic SOV for the targeted sub-brand and a 24% increase in SOV for the broader brand portfolio. This approach not only improved the brand’s visibility but also created an organic brand halo effect, driving a substantial uplift in sales on Amazon during the campaign period. By focusing on SOV monitoring and strategic adjustments, we were able to help the brand achieve greater organic presence, increased traffic, and ultimately, higher sales—all without relying solely on increased ad spend.

We’ve already mentioned how important it is to know which competitors are bidding on your branded keywords. Equally, you can use SOV to make informed decisions about when to defend your keywords and when to try to conquest other competitors’ keywords. Different retailers have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to competitor conquesting.

Competitor conquesting on Amazon

Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) adds a whole new dimension of insights for advertisers, allowing you to target customers who have shown interest in competing brands. By leveraging these insights with Amazon Deman Side Platform (DSP), you can create highly targeted campaigns that reach your competitors’ customers right when they’re ready to make a purchase. The hitch is that AMC doesn’t do this automatically, which is why we created the Amazon Marketing Cloud Dashboard in Pacvue. For example, some brands are using AMC data combined with SOV to find the optimal budget allocation between ad types within Sponsored Ads, then choose the right mix between Sponsored Ads and DSP. In some cases, brands have seen sales grow by as much as +40% with no increase in budget. They’ve achieved this solely through better budget allocation and utilization, made possible by AMC insights and SOV.

Competitor conquesting on Walmart

Like Amazon, you can also target competitor keywords on Walmart and in many cases we’ve found advertising on Walmart to be a bargain compared to Amazon. Again, Pacvue’s SOV tracking can help you prioritize how much spending to allocate to Walmart in your competitor conquesting strategy.

Competitor conquesting on Instacart

Instacart presents a unique set of challenges when it comes to competitor conquesting. Unlike other platforms, Instacart does not provide unblinded category insights, making it difficult to see which competitors are performing well. However, Pacvue can bridge this gap by offering advanced tracking and insights that Instacart’s native UI doesn’t provide. With Pacvue, you can monitor keyword trends down to a SKU or ASIN [SL2] level and track SOV across specific retailers, giving you the competitive edge needed to outmanoeuvre your rivals.

Additionally, Instacart’s platform lacks direct SOV rules and detailed placement data, but Pacvue allows you to set up placement locks to maintain specific ad positions on high-value keywords. For example, you can ensure that your product consistently holds a top position for the keyword “Beer” every weekend, keeping your brand top-of-mind for weekend shoppers.

Tracking Share of Voice (SOV) across different retailers can be challenging due to variations in how each platform measures SOV. Pacvue simplifies this process by providing comprehensive SOV tracking across multiple platforms, overcoming the limitations of retailer-specific reports like those highlighted above. By integrating SOV data with other key commerce metrics, Pacvue delivers unified, in-depth insights, ensuring your brand not only competes but leads in your chosen markets and retailers.

1. Make better decisions faster with advanced commerce analytics platforms like Pacvue

Commerce platforms like Pacvue offer comprehensive tools to manage and optimize advertising campaigns across multiple retail channels. These platforms provide valuable insights into your SOV, keyword performance, and competitor activities, allowing you to streamline ad performance tracking and gain detailed visibility into your SOV. By using commerce analytics, you can efficiently manage your activity across different retailers, making better decisions faster and taking the complexity out of multi-channel retail management.

2. Track competitors’ keywords

Monitoring the keywords your competitors are targeting helps you understand their strategies (such as conquesting) and identify opportunities to capture (or restore) your SOV. Use competitive analysis tools to identify which keywords competitors are bidding on and analyze their performance. Adjust your keyword strategy to target high-impact keywords that allow you to outperform. This approach ensures you’re capitalizing on opportunities to gain visibility in high-traffic keyword areas, helping to increase your SOV.

3. Track key products

Regularly analyze which products are driving the most impressions, clicks, and sales. Focus your advertising efforts on these high-performing products to maximize their visibility. Concentrating on key products ensures that your most profitable items receive optimal exposure, thereby increasing your overall SOV.

4. Create keyword and product SOV tracking automation

Automating the tracking of SOV for keywords and products ensures consistent monitoring and timely adjustments to your campaigns. Set up automated reports and dashboards that track SOV metrics for selected keywords and products. Use tools like Pacvue to get real-time updates and alerts on performance changes. Automation saves time, reduces manual errors, and ensures you are always aware of your SOV dynamics, allowing for swift strategic adjustments.

5. Improve Product Detail Page (PDP) content to enhance profitability and conversion

Your best advertising efforts will go nowhere if you haven’t optimized your content for conversion. Ensure your PDPs are rich with high-quality images, detailed descriptions, customer reviews, and relevant keywords. Optimize for SEO to improve organic visibility alongside paid ads. Enhanced PDP content leads to higher conversion rates, better customer engagement, and increased organic traffic, collectively boosting your SOV.

Conclusion

Share of Voice in retail media is a crucial metric that goes beyond traditional measures like ROAS. By tracking SOV, you gain a comprehensive understanding of your brand’s visibility relative to competitors, allowing you to optimize your ad spend effectively. Whether it’s defending your position in a crowded market or identifying new opportunities, consistent SOV tracking with tools like Pacvue ensures you stay ahead of the competition. As retail media continues to evolve in 2024, mastering SOV will be key to sustainable growth and maximizing your brand’s impact.

What is Share of Voice in the retail media era?

Share of Voice vs Share of Shelf: What’s the difference?

How to calculate Share of Voice

Share of Voice formula

Share of Voice example

Share of Voice isn’t just one metric but a suite of metrics

How Share of Voice can help you protect your brand visibility

Share of Voice example: How Tuft & Needle used Pacvue’s SOV tracking to diagnose a spike in their CPC

How Share of Voice can help you prioritize advertising spending

Share of Voice example: How an electronics brand used SOV to prioritize advertising spend on Walmart vs Amazon

How Share of Voice can inform your ad spend to create an organic halo effect

Share of Voice Example: How a global beauty brand enhanced its organic visibility on Amazon with a targeted SOV strategy

How Share of Voice can help your competitor conquesting strategy