Selling on Amazon is competitive regardless of a brand’s size or category. Brands that have sold on Amazon over the years understand it’s not necessary to be well-known to achieve success on the channel. In fact, many ‘challenger brands’ with the proper support and expertise have become best sellers. With this, understanding how your brand and its products compare to competitors is crucial. That’s where share of voice on Amazon comes into play. Continue reading to learn more about this metric and why it’s important.
On Amazon, share of voice measures how much the percentage of advertising inventory or organic search results a brand owns compared to competing brands. It can signify a range of things about a brand’s presence on the channel, but in essence, represents how often a brand is seen in comparison to its competitors.
To improve share of voice on Amazon, it’s important for brands to consider placing a greater focus on the following:
Understanding share of voice allows brands to develop a strong strategy to gain and continue earning market share. This metric is key in deciding which tactics will ultimately help your brand reach its goals. Knowing how much market share belongs to your brand can also ensure budget is allocated as efficiently as possible.
It's worth noting, the factors mentioned above are important to more than just share of voice. They each contribute to the bigger picture of a brand's presence on Amazon. For example, pricing is a major driver of success because it usually determines whether a product wins the Buy Box. Additionally, a product's content and creative can affect ratings. And ratings can either increase or decrease a product's discoverability. Therefore, measuring share of voice can help brands identify where there's room for improvement and what's working.
Unfortunately, measuring share of voice isn’t simple because the data needed isn’t readily available within Amazon. For now, premium dashboards available to Amazon's biggest spenders. But for smaller brands, it may be worth investing in third-party software or leveraging an agency with access to these tools.
At MPS, we use proprietary technology, MPS Insights. MPS strategists also work closely with our client's Amazon Account Executives. Through these discussions, we're able to gain insight into how much a brand is spending in comparison to others within the category.
Finally, share of voice is something brands should monitor regularly. We revisit share of voice for clients at least once a month. Doing so helps us evaluate how advertising campaigns are performing and helping our clients reach their share of voice goals. Through this process, we're able to find the percentage of sponsored ads that belong to our client versus other brands. This is most often calculated by dividing brand impressions by total impressions for a specific search query.
Measuring share of voice on a regular basis also provides an opportunity to find organic share of voice. We consider how many of the organic positions in the search result belong to our client versus other brands.
If you could use the support of a strategic partner, schedule a free consultation. And, as always, we’re here to answer questions about Share of Voice on Amazon or your presence on Amazon and other marketplaces.