Share of voice calculator

Your share of the category's voice, how far it runs ahead of your market share — and what it takes to get further.

Runs entirely in your browser — nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored. Updated 2026-09-30.

Share of voice (SOV) is your brand's voice divided by the whole category's voice, as a percentage; excess share of voice (ESOV) is SOV minus your share of market. A brand spending $120,000 in a category where competitors spend $680,000 has a 15% share of voice; with a 12% market share, its ESOV is +3 points.

"Voice" can be ad spend, impressions or mentions, as long as every brand is measured in the same unit. ESOV matters because of a long-running pattern in advertising effectiveness data: brands whose share of voice runs ahead of their market share tend to grow, and brands whose voice runs behind tend to shrink. The calculator gives SOV, ESOV, the share change the usual rule of thumb implies, and how much voice a target ESOV would take if competitors hold still.

Which "voice" to measure

Nielsen's definition, in its explainer What is share of voice?, is the first row: a brand's media spending as a percentage of all media spending in the category, in that market, on that channel and at that time. The other rows borrow the ratio for other kinds of attention. Google defines search ad impression share as impressions divided by the total impressions you were eligible for, and its auction insights report shows the same figure for the other advertisers in your Search, Shopping and Performance Max auctions.

The ESOV rule, and how far to trust it

Nielsen summarises Les Binet and Peter Field's study of 171 campaigns from 1980 to 2010 as a brand's market share rising by about 0.5 points a year for every 10 points of ESOV. LinkedIn's B2B Institute, working with Binet and Field on the IPA databank, reports 0.7 points per year for 10 points of ESOV in B2B, against 0.6 in B2C. The calculator's last input is that rate, so you can use whichever fits.

It is an average across many brands and sustained periods, not a forecast for one brand's next quarter. An IPA blog post calls ESOV well evidenced but "a single factor model addressing a multi-factor problem": price, distribution, product and the creative itself move share too. Use ESOV to ask whether a budget is plausibly large enough to grow, and your own results to check.

Reading the result

• ESOV above zero: your voice runs ahead of your share — the position the research associates with growth.
• ESOV near zero: you are spending in proportion to your size, which the pattern associates with holding share.
• ESOV below zero: a large brand can often run here for a while on its existing standing; a small one usually cannot.

The "voice for the target ESOV" assumes competitors keep their voice where it is. If they respond, the target moves — which is why the ratio is worth recalculating each period rather than setting once. To turn the extra voice into a budget by channel, the marketing budget calculator and the impressions calculator take it from there.

Computing this from your own accounts

The calculator needs two sides, and they come from different places. Your side — spend and impressions by channel — is in your ad accounts; TableBI syncs Google Ads, and Meta Ads in beta, into one table you can query from your terminal:

# your paid voice by channel over the latest 28 synced days
tablebi ask "SELECT platform_label(platform) AS channel,
             SUM(cost) AS spend, SUM(impressions) AS impressions
   FROM facts WHERE platform IN ('google_ads', 'meta_ads')
     AND date > (SELECT MAX(date) FROM facts) - 28
   GROUP BY platform ORDER BY spend DESC"

The competitors' side is never in your own accounts. For search ads, Google's auction insights report gives other advertisers' impression share on the auctions you entered; for total media spend it takes a media monitoring source, and for mentions a listening tool. Keep the unit and the period identical on both sides, or the ratio means nothing.

Questions people ask about share of voice calculators

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