Understanding Share of Voice vs Share of Shelf on Amazon

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December 10, 2024

If you’re like most brands and sellers, you’re used to keeping one eye fixed on your Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) at all times, but the truth is, you could still be wasting those ad dollars.

That’s because 70% of Amazon shoppers never make it past the first page of search results. If you’re not there, it’s like you’re not on Amazon at all.

To succeed on Amazon, it’s crucial to think beyond RoAS and start tracking Share of Voice (SOV) and Share of Self (SOS). These metrics are the key to dominating your category, boosting your profits, and ensuring long-term growth.

Amazon Share of Voice (SOV) is the percentage of your brand’s market share that’s visible on the first page of Amazon through paid traffic. In other words, when a customer searches for a related keyword, your SOV is the percentage of sponsored results that come up for your brand.

A high SOV indicates that your paid Amazon ads are giving you a competitive advantage by increasing your presence on Amazon’s page 1.

For example, if we take a sample size of 4 sponsored results, Joomra has a Share of Voice of 25%, since it has 1 sponsored search result on the keyword ‘hiking shoes’:

Amazon Share of Shelf (SOS) is the percentage of your brand’s market share visible on the first page through both paid and organic traffic. Your SOS on Amazon depends on how well your products rank with organic search, in addition to your paid advertising strategy.

For example, ASICs has 1 product sponsored and 1 product organically ranking. That means that, among the 10 listings that show up on the first page, ASICs has 20% Share of Shelf.

If your SOS is low, you can increase ad spend for an instant boost. Or, for a more long-term strategy, you can improve searchability and visibility. If you have a high SOS, you can lower your spending, leverage organic product visibility, and improve click-throughs and conversion rates.

Both your Share of Voice and Share of Shelf reflect your brand’s ability to dominate on Amazon, but there’s a fundamental difference between the two — SOS considers both organic traffic and paid traffic and SOV considers only paid traffic.

Here’s a more complete breakdown of the core benefits of each:

	Share of Voice	Share of Shelf
Improves Amazon SERP visibility	✅	✅
Includes paid traffic	✅	✅
Includes organic traffic	❌	✅
Increases with ad spend	✅	✅
Increases with optimized keywords	✅	✅
Increases with optimized product listings	❌	✅
Compares advertising campaigns including sponsored products, brands, and video ads	✅	❌
Compares product listings based on keywords, categories, or brands	❌	✅

Why Both SOV and SOS Are Crucial to Growth on Amazon

Share of Shelf and Share of Voice are important for your eCommerce merchandising strategy because they help you boost your brand visibility, dominate each product category, win sales, and more.

Pinpoint the Right Keywords

Your Share of Shelf and Share of Voice tell you whether or not you’re using the right keywords to optimize your product detail pages and PPC campaigns. If your keywords aren’t landing your brand on page one, it may be time to go back to the drawing board with your keyword research.

Using SOS and SOV in conjunction with Amazon keyword research tools can help you more effectively reach the right target audience. That means both your sponsored brand ads and product listings show up where they’re most relevant.

Boost Brand Visibility and Awareness

Both SOV and SOS help you understand whether you’re reaching a majority of customers who never venture past the first page. By finding ways to increase top-of-funnel traffic, you can build more brand awareness — and often, more sales.

While they don’t always show a direct impact on conversion rates, improving SOV and SOS puts your brand in the spotlight so you can be top of mind for customers when they’re ready to make a purchase.

Identify Trends and Benchmark Performance

In eCommerce, drastic changes in search volume can happen. But that doesn’t always mean your campaigns aren’t working. Seasonal shifts, market fluctuations, Prime Days, and other peak season events can all impact product demand, resulting in sudden drops or increases that are out of your control.

That’s where SOS and SOV come in. These two metrics show you how you’re performing relative to other players in your product category, so that you can understand more clearly whether other brands are experiencing the same shifts and can make better decisions about where to invest your ad dollars.

Sharpen Your Competitive Edge

Understanding your position on the Amazon SERP can give you insight into where your competitors are spending their own ad dollars. For example, you can see whether they’re trying to reach your customers by improving their own SOS and SOV.

Let’s say an Amazon search for ‘ASICS men’ shows sponsored ad results for two competitors, giving ASICS an SOS of 80% on their brand search term. In this case, ASICS should consider increasing its SOS through sponsored ad campaigns in order to dominate the results for its brand keyword.

To boost your visibility and dominate your category, channel your ad dollars wisely with the following strategies:

Increase Your Ad Budget

One of the easiest ways to improve your immediate SOV is by increasing your ad budget. More budget will allow you to bid more on your ad campaigns and increase your visibility. Over time, this initial ad spend also influences organic traffic, improving your SOS as well.

However, product lifecycle also plays a role. If your product is in the launch phase, it probably won’t have a ton of organic traffic, so allocating more ad spend is usually necessary to increase SOV. If your product is in the growing or maturity stage, you’ll want to track both SOS and SOV to maintain dominance over brands competing on your top keywords.

Set Up Campaigns Properly

To get the most SOV bang for your buck, set up your sponsored ad campaigns using all the latest best practices. Start by harvesting the best keywords, using tools like Google Keyword Planner or our Amazon Keyword Tool.

Focus on the three Amazon PPC targeting types: broad, phrase, and exact match. Using more effective and specific keywords can improve your chances of reaching potential buyers with high purchase intent.

You can also use an automated targeting campaign to bypass the keyword search process and automatically manage your bids. This is sometimes a safer bet for sellers with less Amazon PPC experience. The disadvantage is that it can raise your ACoS if you don’t have the right bidding rules in place.

Need help optimizing your PPC campaigns? Don’t miss these Top 10 Amazon Campaign Strategies for growing brands.

Optimize Your Ad Spend

With the right approach, you can optimize your ad campaigns for a higher SOV while keeping the same budget. One way to do this is to allocate more of your spending to the products, keywords, and campaigns that give you the most visibility.

Divide your top keywords into a set of branded, most relevant, and competitor keywords, then optimize campaigns by either bidding aggressively or reallocating budget. Here’s why this strategy works:

Allocating spend to branded keywords prevents competitors from stealing your customers.
Focusing on the most relevant keywords (non-branded) can help increase your chances of landing on Amazon’s page 1.
Targeting competitor keywords can get your products displayed when shoppers search for your competitors’ products — and convert well if your product is better.

Already a Trellis user? You can optimize ad spend by deploying and reallocating budget between branded, generic, and competitor keywords. Our AI automates keyword/ASIN research, keyword implementation, and bid optimization so you don’t have to waste time (or money) on manual ad strategies.

Use Negative Keywords

One crucial component to reducing ad spend on Amazon is using negative keywords. Targeting the keywords you don’t want your ads to appear on ensures that you’re not wasting your ad spend in the wrong places.

When you use negative keywords, you reduce your ACoS on clicks that aren’t likely to lead to a purchase. You can then reallocate those extra dollars to your most important campaigns.

Using negative keywords also indirectly boosts your organic traffic and SOS. By showing your ads to fewer irrelevant users, you boost your click-through rate, conversion rate, and ultimately your product rankings.

Once you’ve used Share of Voice to increase your presence on Amazon, use these strategies to keep growing organically.

Improve Your Conversion Rate

If your conversion rate is high, your SOS will significantly improve. When a customer is more likely to buy your product after a search query, the Amazon ranking algorithm (sometimes called the A9 or A10 algorithm) takes it as a strong signal to improve organic ranking.

Better organic ranking leads to better visibility, taking some of the pressure off sponsored ads to improve SOS.

Optimize Your Listings

Your product listings play a huge role in determining your organic search rank and SOS on Amazon. The Amazon ranking algorithm takes into account your:

Product title
Product description
Bullet points
Images and video
Alt text
Use of A+ Content
Ratings and reviews

By optimizing your product listings, you can dramatically increase your chances of landing on Amazon’s first page and winning the click once you’re there. Even small things, like adding numerical values in your title, can increase your click-through rates by as much as 36%.

Ratings play a major role in increasing rankings and SOS. To increase your review count, check out our complete guide on How to Get More Reviews on Amazon.

Optimize Your Pricing

A smart pricing strategy can help you rank higher with Amazon’s algorithms. To keep your rankings steady and improve your SOS, you need to take a thoughtful approach that adjusts automatically according to demand.

For example, dynamic pricing tools offer a way to set pricing automatically, in real time, to keep your products competitive. You can also use them to support a range of goals like winning the Buy Box, improving your Best Sellers Rank (BSR), and more. You can take advantage of Amazon’s built-in dynamic pricing tools. Or, try a more robust third-party tool with more sophisticated features.

Tracking your SOV and SOS for several keywords, products, and campaigns can be time-consuming. The most effective way to monitor both metrics is by using data analytics tools that automatically take input from your organic and paid traffic to build data visualizations.

Trellis’ eCommerce merchandising platform provides Share of Voice and Share of Shelf for the first page and above the fold (top 8 results).

You can view a snapshot of your Share of Voice and Share of Shelf.

Or you can view a time of both metrics to understand your dominance on your top keywords targeted.

You can instantly understand how your brand or products perform against the competitors and what actions to take in case your SOV or SOS drops.

Trellis offers more metrics for your brands and competitors to help you understand your market share:

Average ranking position
Ranking keywords
Price range
Average product rating
Average number of reviews
Number of listed ads
Average ad position

Make Your Voice Heard on Amazon

To dominate that first page, you need to consistently track your Amazon SOV and SOS. Then, combine your market share analysis with other key KPIs, like ACoS and RoAS. A data-driven approach can help you make better decisions, improve your rankings, and grow your brand.

To learn more, schedule your personalized demo with the Trellis team.

Caroline Powell

The Leslie Knope of Digital Marketing. With over 10 years of experience in eCommerce and digital marketing, Caroline focuses on driving strategic growth for Trellis as well as online brands of all shapes and sizes. She holds a B.B.A. from the University of Georgia, and you'll find her calling the Dawgs every Saturday during football season. When she isn't developing comprehensive marketing strategies, you'll find her taking dance classes, walking her dog, or reading thrillers.