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A few years ago, analysts studying consumer brands noticed a relationship between how often people searched for a brand and its share of the market. The two measures appeared to move together, suggesting that share of search could serve as a proxy for market share.
The idea caught on, partly because share of voice had become increasingly difficult to measure across a fragmented media landscape. Search offered a cheap, publicly available metric that seemed to provide an answer to a difficult question.
But a relationship that holds in one market doesn't necessarily hold in another, particularly when you move from consumer goods to B2B technology.
Liam Moroney has spent the past two or three years analyzing branded search across thousands of data sets and working directly with companies. He initially approached the metric with the same assumptions as everyone else. His experience has led him to a different conclusion about what it can tell us.
In Episode 14 of B2B Effectiveness: Evidence-Based Marketing Ideas for B2B Practitioners, Liam and Dale W. Harrison build on the previous episode, Working Backwards from Success, which explored how easily marketers can draw misleading conclusions from data. This time, they examine whether share of search really tells us what marketers assume it does, and where its value lies.
Why share of search doesn't always reflect market share
The original observation wasn't wrong. In some consumer markets, share of search tracks market share remarkably well.
But as Dale explains, selling yogurt on a supermarket shelf is fundamentally different from selling a multimillion-dollar ERP system to a billion-dollar company. Consumer goods often have relatively consistent prices, purchase quantities and routes to market. B2B purchases can vary enormously across all three.
There's also the question of how market share behaves over time. Across thousands of brands and categories, market share tends to be relatively stable. Even when a category grows substantially, competing brands can grow at similar rates while maintaining much the same relative position, unless one gains a meaningful advantage or a competitor stumbles.
If share of search reflected market share directly, you'd expect it to remain similarly stable. In practice, search can move considerably for reasons that have little to do with revenue.
What makes B2B markets different?
Share of search is more likely to track market share when products are relatively interchangeable, prices and purchase quantities are similar, and customers follow much the same buying process.
Dale illustrates this with the analogy of a supermarket counting everyone who enters through the front door. If most customers follow the same route to purchase, foot traffic can provide a reasonable indication of sales. But if some enter through an unmonitored back door, that relationship becomes less reliable.
The same principle applies to branded search: it can only provide a useful proxy for market share when search activity consistently reflects purchasing behavior.
In B2B, several factors make that relationship less predictable:
- Price: A search for a $20 product and a $200,000 contract doesn't represent the same potential revenue.
- Purchase volume: One customer might buy a single software license, while another buys thousands for an entire organization.
- Conversion to revenue: Free trials can generate substantial search interest without converting users into paying customers.
- Routes to purchase: Deals can come through partners, RFPs, consultants or existing relationships, without the buyer necessarily searching for the brand.
What branded search can (and can't) tell us about B2B markets
Throughout the webinar, Liam and Dale examine several technology companies to illustrate why search visibility, market share and commercial performance don't always move together.
When search volume and revenue tell different stories
One comparison looks at three companies in the social media management category: Buffer, Sprout Social and Sprinklr.
Based on branded search volume alone, Buffer appears to be the dominant player, attracting in some cases around three times as many searches as Sprout Social. But the companies operate at different ends of the market. Buffer offers a lower-cost, self-service product with free-trial options, while Sprout Social and Sprinklr target higher-value customers, including enterprise accounts.
Liam and Dale compare these search volumes with the best available estimates of each company's revenue share, revealing a different picture. Buffer accounts for nearly half of category search volume but only around 1% of category revenue. Its contract values can be in the hundreds of dollars, while some Sprout Social contracts reach millions.
Search volume makes Buffer look much larger than it is in revenue terms. Neither measure is necessarily inaccurate; they capture different things. Branded search tells you something about a company's visibility and the interest it attracts, but not how much revenue that interest represents.
Why declining search doesn't always mean declining revenue
The webinar also explores how changes in branded search can differ from business growth.
Sprout Social's branded search fell by double digits over the 12-month period examined in the webinar. Its financial performance, however, tells a different story: revenue grew substantially, with higher-spending customers growing even faster.
As Dale explains, the company deliberately pursued larger accounts, increasing its average contract value rather than relying on attracting more customers. Its declining search volume therefore tells us relatively little about its revenue performance.
More users don't necessarily mean more revenue
Another comparison examines the difference between customer penetration and revenue share, using HubSpot and Salesforce.
HubSpot has roughly 50% greater market penetration than Salesforce, whether measured by accounts or seats. Yet Salesforce leads in revenue, at around $37 billion compared with HubSpot's $2 billion to $3 billion.
The difference is even clearer among the largest companies. Liam estimates that Salesforce holds around 85% market share among the Fortune 1000, compared with 0.4% for HubSpot.
While HubSpot has a larger overall user base, Salesforce captures a much greater share of spending among major enterprises.
This illustrates the different ways a brand can grow: by winning more customers, attracting larger customers or increasing the value of existing relationships. Search volume alone can't tell you which is driving growth.
What branded search is actually good for
While branded search is an unreliable proxy for B2B market share, Liam and Dale argue that it can reveal something equally useful: whether demand across a category is growing or shrinking.
Understanding category demand
Looking beyond individual brands can reveal trends that company-level search figures miss. A business might be growing even as its wider category declines, or gaining market share simply because competitors are losing ground.
Liam illustrates this with Hightouch, which became a leading player in the customer data platform (CDP) category while the category itself was declining. The company has since moved away from that category altogether. Being a leading brand in a shrinking market doesn't guarantee a sustainable opportunity. As Liam puts it, nobody wants 100% of a market that has no customers left.
Dale draws on a historical example from the fax machine market. As demand contracted dramatically from the late 1990s into the early 2000s, Ricoh continued selling and marketing while competitors exited. Its share of the remaining market rose even as the category itself collapsed.
Looking at brand-level search alongside total category search could reveal both trends: Ricoh gaining ground while overall demand fell sharply. Without that wider context, a rising share could easily be mistaken for evidence of a healthy, growing market.
What changing demand means for lead generation
Changes in category demand also have implications for lead generation.
The 95:5 rule assumes a relatively stable market in which roughly 5% of potential buyers are in-market at any given time. In a category growing by 100% a year, that proportion could be much higher. Liam suggests it may approach one in four prospects, changing the likelihood of finding buyers and how marketers should qualify leads.
In a shrinking category, the reverse can happen. Liam points to B2B demo software as an example of a market facing pressure as buyers turn to tools such as Claude to build demos themselves. When demand contracts, fewer prospects may be looking for a product, regardless of how well the marketing team executes.
That can make a growing category feel like a marketing success story and a declining one feel like a sales problem. But performance needs to be understood in the context of the market itself.
Branded search won't tell you your market share. Used carefully, it can help reveal whether demand for your category is growing or shrinking – context that can change how you interpret your marketing performance.
Want to understand where demand is heading in your market? Explore our Demand Tracker to see how market demand is changing and what it could mean for your next campaign.
