Share of Search

Case Studies:

The Context

Our client wanted to evaluate the impact of media and other communications activity on top of funnel measures such as awareness and salience. This kind of awareness measurement is traditionally done by expensive market research.

The Challenge

To analyse its market share – getting hold of data is not cheap and is difficult for most clients. For our client ESSEC, the Singapore market has a sample size of only 15,000 who are interested in a Business School education at a given point of time. With this small data size, a traditional way to research would be an expensive exercise.

Our Solution

So, we adopted an innovative approach: Share of Search – This metric is proven to be a lead indicator of market share and awareness in high involvement categories where Search is an important part of the consumer journey.

Methodology

The Share of Search was calculated following these steps

We identified a competitive set of 9 competitors in 9 markets
We collected search volumes for the category and the competitors for a 24-month period
In each market we measured at 3 levels
- - Share of competition
  - Share of category
  - Share of search for specific Business Programs
Thereby establishing baseline search volume for ESSEC

Findings

We ascertained that awareness and salience is growing strongly for ESSEC in Singapore
There is an opportunity to build ESSEC’s presence associated with specific Business programs
In one market, there are very encouraging signs with search volume growing strongly in the last 18 months

Our Results

Share of Business School

0 %

The rolling 12–24-month technique to monitor search combined with predictive modelling can be used as a planning metric to signal Market share and Awareness.

Share of Search Simplified = Number of searches for your brand ÷ Number of searches for all competitors