The idea that a marketing metric could be both free, accurate, and versatile seems too good to be true. Late last year, share of search (SoS) burst into industry conversation, heralded in a much-discussed column in Marketing Week by the marketing expert Mark Ritson. In it, he argues that share of search is a far more robust metric than the strategic holy grail of ‘share of voice’, which has proved difficult to calculate in our digitally fragmented environment by anyone other than the very biggest brands.
This shot the debate into the planner conversation, but things got serious...