How Share of Search Helps Predict Market Share: A Marketer’s Guide

Share of Search is a metric that tracks your brand's search volume (sourced from Google Trends) relative to your competitors' brand search volumes, adjusted for the overall market search volume. It's a simple yet powerful tool for assessing how much attention your brand is generating in comparison to others in your industry.

To calculate Share of Search, you’d look at the trend for a specific market keyword—let's say “lab grown diamonds” in this case. Then, you'd measure search trends for your brand, such as "Grown Brilliance," and compare it to competitors like James Allen, VRAI, Blue Nile, and Clean Origin. This approach offers a clear, real-time understanding of where your brand stands in the competitive landscape.

When we ran this analysis for Grown Brilliance, a long-time client in the lab-grown diamond industry, it became clear that Share of Search serves as a proxy for brand awareness. By tracking search trends over time, we were able to measure the direct impact of our brand awareness campaigns and adjust strategies as needed.

As highlighted in a webinar by Les Binet, which I highly recommend watching, Share of Search is a strong leading indicator of market share. Binet’s research shows that in industries like automotive, Share of Search can predict market shifts up to 12 months in advance. For example, if searches for Ford drop by 10% this month, it’s likely that Ford’s market share will follow with a similar 10% decline over the next year.

What Is Share of Search?

At its core, Share of Search measures the volume of searches for a specific brand on search engines, like Google, relative to the total number of searches in the industry. Simply put, it’s the percentage of times people are looking for your brand compared to others in your sector.

As demonstrated in this video, Share of Search is not just a fancy buzzword but an early indicator of market share. Binet's research shows a direct correlation between a brand's share of search and its actual market share. Brands that capture a higher percentage of searches also tend to dominate their industries in real life.

Why Does It Matter?

This metric is more than just a reflection of search volume. As highlighted in our recent presentation, Share of Search is a strong predictor of market trends. For instance, consider the automotive industry. Ford, with the highest market share, also leads the pack in search interest compared to other competitors like Hyundai. In this case, more searches signal increased brand awareness, which, in turn, often precedes shifts in market share.

Real-World Use Cases:

Brand Equity for New Store Acquisitions: Share of Search helps brands like Grown Brilliance measure and react to the impacts of their upper-funnel advertising efforts. Whether running campaigns on Facebook, Pinterest, or CTV, this metric serves as a barometer of brand interest in real-time, making it easier for brands to track whether their investments in brand-building activities are paying off.

Predicting Market Share: One of the most powerful insights derived from Share of Search is its predictive capability. In many cases, changes in this metric precede changes in actual market share. For example, when a brand’s share of search goes up, market share follows—and vice versa. For data-savvy marketers, this means Share of Search can be used as an early warning system, signaling shifts in consumer interest before they show up in revenue reports.

Simplified Data Collection: Contrary to what some might believe, Share of Search is incredibly simple to track. By using free tools like Google Trends, marketers can easily monitor the relative share of searches for their brand. Data can then be exported to a Google Sheet, providing a real-time snapshot of brand interest and competitive positioning.

Lastly, HERE is a template with a script of how to run the report and a recording walking through how to do this here.