Share of voice (SOV)

What it is#

Share of voice (SOV) measures how much of the total conversation, visibility, or ad presence in a market belongs to one brand versus everyone else competing for the same attention. It is always a ratio: one brand's presence divided by the total presence of the tracked set.

The "voice" being measured depends on the channel. In paid search it's impression share. In SEO it's the share of ranking positions for a keyword set. In PR and social it's the share of brand mentions. In each case the shape is the same — a percentage of a finite pie.

Why it matters for agencies#

Share of voice is one of the few metrics that contextualizes performance against the market rather than against the brand's own past. Organic traffic can fall while share of voice rises — because the whole category contracted and the brand lost less ground than its competitors. A brief that reports only absolute numbers misses that story; a brief that reports SOV catches it.

For brand and creative agencies in particular, SOV is often the closest thing to a KPI for work whose value is hard to capture with last-click attribution.

In SendBriefs specifically#

The brand-health template ships with a share-of-voice section designed to sit alongside awareness and sentiment metrics — the cluster of numbers that justify long-arc brand work to a client who wants to see competitive movement, not just traffic.