Microsoft’s adCenter recently launched the Share of Voice metrics to their standard reports. Now available on the ad group level, the SOV is designed to help advertisers optimize their pay-per-click campaign. Furthermore, it will provide information about how often they are earning impressions.
Lucy Wang, product manager of adCenter, also added:
“Share of Voice represents the percentage of times your ads were actually shown in relation to the total number of chances your ads could have been shown, based on your keyword and campaign settings. It provides quantified insight into what your impression share is, and more importantly, the reasons why you lost certain impressions, allowing you to take precise actions.”
Understanding and Taking Action about Share of Voice
Also called as Impression Share, the Share of Voice is now live in the ad group level. It’ll tell you what percentage of your SOV is lost to various components such as budget, rank, bid, keyword relevance and landing page relevance. All that a marketer needs to do is customize a standard report on the account, campaign or ad group level.
However, modifying a PPC campaign based on the SOV report is the advertiser’s call. Although it is not actionable like changing bids based on keyword performance on the first glance, it can still provide information as to where to focus a brand’s optimization efforts.
The new metric component can give reports that marketers can optimize. But it’ll be better if the adCenter can give metrics that they can optimize, and let them optimize anything that they can measure.
Clearing the SOV Misconception
Basically, if you have high SOV, you can expand into related terms. On the other hand, a low SOV gives you an opportunity to improve performance on your existing terms.
On the contrary, it’s not a measure of a campaign’s impressions versus the total search volume for keywords in an ad group, campaign or account. It compares the impressions against the search volume left over after considering your campaign settings, rank, bids and relevance.
Therefore, there really is no good or bad SOV. In fact, every marketer will have their differing reference of a good and bad impression share. What’s important is that you have a baseline and that it is consistent across your account.
Microsoft’s timing for SOV can be a bit behind compared to Google AdWords; however, they always push the envelope whenever they roll out similar features. The new metric component adds more reason behind the lost SOV, increasing the fidelity of the reports.