Online SOV – how to analyze it

What is your Online SOV on the Web?

If you have ever used TNS to try and figure out how much your competitors are spending on online advertising, you know that the numbers can be way off. Moreover, you don’t have access to their web analytics tool so you don’t know how many unique visitors they are getting every month either. I like using Compete.com because you can pull traffic data on your website and your top 4 competitors based on a sample that Compete collects.

Compete is a very powerful tool that can help you track the competition and online sov. In addition to providing website traffic, it will also tell you what keywords are popular for all brands, what affiliate links, and more.

Back to analyzing online sov, I not only like to compare competitor unique visitor data for my clients, but also show an estimate of how much money the competition is spending online (since we know that paid search and online display have the highest correlation with website traffic). By pulling unique visitor data from Compete, we can show the percentage of ‘online share of voice in the market’.

From looking at the example above, we can see that recently Budlight.com has been increasing its online share of voice the past couple of months. How is this helpful? Tracking this will provide a benchmark as to how much share of online voice you have with your online advertising budget. This is just one of the insights you can get out of Compete.com. There is much more insight you can pull especially when it comes to paid and organic search.

Well what about Facebook Fans and Twitter Followers? “My brand has more fans than my competitors, but we have a smaller online sov?” Good question. My suggestion is that you ‘weight’ a Facebook Fan and Twitter Follower. To be more specific, a Facebook Fan can equate to 50 unique visits. Why 50 and not 1, 10, or 100? It doesn’t matter how you decide to weight a fan or follower, the important thing is to keep it consistent across your brand and your competitors. Again, I am not saying a Facebook Fan is worth 50 unique visitors to your site, I will leave that discussion to other analysts and social media experts.

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