Metrics like Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) are a classic way to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns, but how can you assess your performance against competitors? To fully optimize your retail media strategy, you need a keen eye on your competitors. This is where Share of Voice (SOV) comes in. Share of Voice analysis in retail media is 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, we’ll explain:
- What Share of Voice is 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
What is Share of Voice in Retail Media?
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 within search results on retailers 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, your Share of Voice provides a crucial measure of your visibility and prominence through advertising. It allows you to assess critical success factors, particularly:
Ads Share of Voice
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 Amazon ranking. 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 eCommerce Market Share
The more visible you are to shoppers, i.e., the higher your Amazon ranking and share of search, 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 you need to increase investment in a particular channel or platform to improve competitiveness and market share.
What’s the Difference between Share of Voice and Share of Shelf?
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 paid advertising. It reflects how much you’re investing in sponsored products, brands, and video ads to dominate the paid space on retailer platforms. Measuring SOV in Pacvue, you can filter between organic and paid to get a more granular understanding of your market share.
- 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 ads’ Share of Voice but also on how well your products rank organically–your total share of search. This makes SOS a more comprehensive measure of your brand’s overall presence on the digital shelf.
This distinction is crucial because SOV provides insight into how effectively you’re leveraging paid media, whereas SOS provides a broader view of your brand’s overall ecommerce market share, factoring in both paid efforts and organic performance.
How to Calculate Share of Voice in Retail Media
You can think of your ads’ Share of Voice 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 Calculator
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 Calculator in this instance would be:
SOV = (1,000)/(10,000) x 100 = 10%
This means your brand captured 10% of all the ad impressions for that keyword, indicating how visible your brand was compared to others.
Share of Voice isn’t just one metric but a suite of metrics
The previous example focused on impressions, but it’s important to note that your ads Share of Voice 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 analysis into our Pacvue 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 it can inform your decision making.
How Share of Voice can protect your brand visibility
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. You can gain intelligence on:
- The types of campaigns your competitors are running
- The keywords your competitors are bidding on
- Daily changes to your paid and organic share of search
By tracking SOV in this way, you can identify competitor strategies that are harming your visibility.
How Tuft & Needle used Pacvue’s SOV tracking to diagnose a spike in their CPC
For example, Pacvue had solved this issue for Tuft & Needle, who used SOV tracking through Pacvue 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 Share of Voice analysis, 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.
How Share of Voice can help you prioritize advertising spending
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. You might 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.
How to use Share of Voice tracking with Pacvue’s Bid Explorer
Pacvue’s Bid Explorer uses historical performance data to recommend optimal bid levels. It considers current CPC trends, competitor activity and budgets and gives you forecasted performance at different bid prices. It helps you to bid more efficiently to reach your goal, be it increasing conversions or gaining Share of Voice. Combining SOV tracking and bid forecasting gives you a loop of insight. Here’s how to do it:
First, use Pacvue’s SOV analysis to identify gaps; if SOV is low for high priority terms or placements, that indicates a visibility gap. Next, test increased bids in those areas and use Bid Explorer to forecast the best outcomes. Now you can monitor how SOV changes in response; if share improves and sales follow, your strategy worked.
How an electronics brand used SOV to prioritize advertising spend on Walmart vs Amazon
Share of Voice analysis 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 ads Share of Voice.
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.
How Share of Voice can inform your ad spend to create an organic halo effect
We know that retailer search algorithms are heavily influenced by the volume of product sales. This means the more your product sells, the more visible your product will become in organic search. In this way, paid ads can cause a boost in sales that leads to an increase in organic search rank, hence a ‘halo effect’. This is why we advocate tracking both paid and organic SOV–your total share of search; you can have visibility over which campaigns contribute to an organic halo effect and improve your overall ecommerce market share.
How a global beauty brand enhanced its organic visibility on Amazon with a targeted SOV strategy
We recently helped a leading global beauty brand enhance its organic share of search on Amazon by implementing a targeted ads Share of Voice 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. It meant that these items gained more visibility and higher rankings in search results.
The results were significant, with a 36% increase in organic share of search 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 increasing ad spend.
How Share of Voice works alongside incrementality (iROAS)
Incrementality, or iROAS, is about being able to distinguish between the (incremental) sales you’ve made because of your advertising, rather than the sales that would have happened anyway. Pacvue allows you to combine incrementality analysis with Share of Voice insights to finely hone your campaign. This means you can spend more of your budget on ads that will drive incremental sales, and waste less on shoppers who will buy your product without seeing your ads. Here’s how to do it:
Step-by-Step Guide: How to use incrementality measurement with Share of Voice analysis for growth
1. Understand what’s driving incremental growth (iROAS)
Pacvue’s incrementality (iROAS) tools help identify which ads drive genuine sales lift, not just conversions that would have happened anyway. This means you can cut waste and focus budgets on high-impact formats, keywords, or audiences.
2. Benchmark ad presence with Share of Voice analysis
Use Pacvue’s Share of Voice tracking to spot areas where you’re outperformed by rivals, and identify categories or keywords where you need more presence.
3. Combine the insights for retail media campaign optimization
Using both sets of data together allows you see if increasing ads Share of Voice in a product category boosts sales, or just shifts budget ineffectively. Now you can prioritize spend on placements with both high incrementality and low SOV to gain ground efficiently. You can also adjust bids and targeting based on incremental return, not just impression volume or ROAS.
4. Monitor competitor moves and respond wisely
If SOV analysis shows a rival gaining ground, your incrementality data will help you decide if a counter-campaign is worth it. Will increasing spend give you measurable lift?
How Share of Voice analysis can help your competitor conquesting strategy
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 using Share of Voice and AMC insights
Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) data 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 Demand-Side Platform (DSP), you can create highly targeted campaigns that reach your competitors’ customers right when they’re ready to make a purchase with the Amazon Marketing Cloud (AMC) Dashboard in Pacvue.
For example, some brands are using AMC data combined with Share of Voice analysis to find the optimal budget split between Sponsored Ad types, then weighing up Sponsored Ads vs 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. 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 offers a distinct environment for competitor conquesting, with some differences compared to other platforms – such as the absence of unblinded category insights. While this makes it harder to directly identify top-performing competitors, Pacvue partners to deliver advanced tracking capabilities and granular insights beyond Instacart’s native UI. With Pacvue, you can monitor keyword trends down to a SKU or ASIN [SL2] level and track Share of Voice across specific retailers, giving you the competitive edge needed to outmaneuver your rivals.
Altough Instacart doesn’t currently provide 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.
Do I need a Share of Voice tracking tool?
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 Share of Voice analysis across multiple platforms, overcoming the limitations of retailer-specific reports. By integrating SOV data with other key commerce metrics, Pacvue delivers unified, in-depth insights. This ensures your brand not only competes but leads in your chosen markets and retailers.
5 best practices for measuring and improving Share of Voice in retail media in 2024
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 Share of Voice, 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 to outperform in Share of Voice
Monitoring the keywords your competitors are targeting helps you understand their strategies (such as conquesting) and identify opportunities to capture (or restore) your SOV. It’s pertinent to 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 and focus your retail media investment
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 share of search and ecommerce market share.
4. Automate keyword and product SOV tracking to remain agile in your retail media campaigns
Automating the tracking of Share of Voice 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 each retailer’s search algorithm 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 Share of Voice and ecommerce market share.
Share of Voice analysis is crucial for growing ecommerce market share
Share of Voice in retail media is a crucial metric that goes beyond traditional measures like ROAS. Share of Voice analysis gives you 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, mastering SOV will be key to sustainable growth and maximizing your brand’s impact. Connect with our commerce experts today to see how we can solve your Share of Voice capabilities.
