The Googleshare: A Marketing Proxy

In marketing, one of the means by which to estimate the success of your campaign or promotions is by determining the mindshare. For instance, if you run a printer brand, say, HP, and you want to compare it against the other competitors in your industry, you would usually commission a study or survey to determine which brands people actually think of when someone mentions to them the term “printer”. The percentage of this relative to the total would then be the brand’s minshare among its customer base.

Google can also give you a proxy of the estimate of mindshare, and this is by the sheer number of search results for a certain keyword or name. It’s a bit like using Google Trends, but this time, we’re not looking for trends, but a share in the pie.

How to do it? Simple!

Just execute a search on the items you want to compare and take note of the number of search results Google has on that topic. For instance, we search among the major printer manufacturers, and let’s say these are HP, Epson, Canon and Lexmark.

Since some of these brands also manufacture equipment other than printers, we use a qualifier after each name. So we have searched:

HP printer

We see that HP has about 110 million sites indexed by Google.

Canon has about 60 million pages indexed:

Epson has the 40 million:

Finally, a search on Lexmark yields about 25 million.

Now for the results. The total number of search results, as aggregated, is 235 million. Now we use this as the total sum, for getting the “mindshare” or google share of the brands you want to compare.

HP – 47%
Canon – 26%
Epson – 17%
Lexmark – 11%

As expected, HP was the most popular among the rest of the printer brands.