Share of voice
Share of voice is your share of the total advertising presence in a category. You can measure it in spend, or in impressions, which are showings of ads. If the category showed ads 10 million times and yours showed 1 million times, your share of voice is 10%. It answers how loud you are, not whether the ads worked.
Theodor Lindfors, Founding Marketer ·
Formula
SOV = your impressions (or spend) / total category impressions (or spend)
How to calculate share of voice
Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. Typical ads run on Meta, TikTok, and YouTube. Share of voice asks a competitive question: of all the advertising in electrolyte drinks this quarter, how much was this brand.
Divide your volume by the category volume, using the same unit for both. Impressions, spend, and search impression share all work, but they answer slightly different questions and will not agree with each other. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The brand spends $200,000. The named competitor set spends $800,000 more. Category total is $1,000,000. SOV (share of voice) is 20%. Define the category before you calculate. A narrow set of three sports drinks flatters you. A broad set that includes every hydration brand makes the drink brand look invisible. Write the set down and keep it stable so the trend means something.
What share of voice is used for
Share of voice is used for planning and budget conversations, mostly. The long-running argument in brand marketing is that sustained SOV (share of voice) above your market share tends to precede growth, and sustained SOV below it tends to precede decline. Whether you buy that framework or not, the ratio is a useful planning input. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. If the brand has 12% of electrolyte sales and 8% of the ads, the brand is quieter than its shelf.
Share of voice also explains competitive pressure that shows up in your account. A rising CPM (cost per thousand impressions) with unchanged creative and audience is often a competitor buying more voice. Let's take a drink brand as an example. They sell a low-sugar sports drink for active women over 50, mostly from their own website. The brand did not get worse. Someone else got louder.
Share of voice vs impression share
Impression share is measured against your own eligible impressions inside one platform. Share of voice is measured against competitors across a category. Impression share tells a drink brand how much of its available YouTube demand it captured. SOV (share of voice) tells the drink brand how much of the electrolyte room it occupied. You can own 90% impression share on a tiny keyword and still have 5% share of voice in the category.
Common share of voice mistakes
- Treating third-party spend estimates as precise figures rather than directional ones for a drink brand.
- Changing the competitive set between reports and calling the difference a trend.
- Buying voice in a category where the drink has no distinct reason to be chosen.
Lemonado
See this number in Lemonado
Lemonado reads spend and results together from the platforms you connect, so you can ask for this metric without building a sheet. It can also act on what it finds, inside rules you set.