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Share of Voice Calculator

Enter your brand and up to five competitors. Get share of voice, share of market, and the excess share of voice that predicts growth.

Free toolsGrowth & StrategyReviewed September 2026

Use the same source and period for every brand. Row 1 is you. Blank rows are ignored.

BrandsMarket: revenue or units in any consistent unit. Optional, but needed for share of market and ESOV.

Your share of voice

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Your voice ÷ total voice

Your share of market
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Needs market figures
Excess share of voice
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SOV − SOM
Rank by voice
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Voice leader
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Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is stored or sent anywhere. Last reviewed September 2026.

All brands

Brand Voice SOV Market SOM ESOV

Why excess share of voice predicts growth

Brands that are louder than their size tend to grow, and brands that are quieter than their size tend to shrink. That is the core of excess share of voice: your share of the category's advertising (or attention) minus your share of its sales. The idea dates to work by John Philip Jones in the 1990s and was extended by Les Binet and Peter Field in their analyses of the IPA databank, a large set of audited effectiveness case studies. Their widely cited rule of thumb is that roughly 10 points of ESOV has been associated with roughly half a point of market share growth per year, on average, across the cases they studied.

The mechanism is simple. Share of voice drives mental availability, the chance a buyer thinks of you when they enter the market. Sustain a share of voice above your share of market and you are recruiting more future buyers than you are losing; fall below it and competitors are doing that to you. The relationship is an average, not a law. Better creative earns more growth per point of ESOV, larger brands need less ESOV to hold share, and a strong price promotion can distort a year. But over a few years it is one of the more reliable patterns in marketing effectiveness research.

The practical use is budget defense. When finance proposes cutting media, ESOV lets you say what that cut does to share, in the same units the board uses. A negative ESOV is not always wrong: a mature brand harvesting profit may choose it deliberately. What it should never be is accidental.

Formulas

SOV
= Brand voice ÷ Σ Voice (all brands)
SOM
= Brand market ÷ Σ Market (all brands with a figure)
ESOV
= SOV − SOM (percentage points)
Rank
= position when sorted by SOV, highest first

Frequently asked questions

How do you calculate share of voice?

Share of voice is your brand's voice metric divided by the total for every brand in the comparison, including yours. If you have 1,500 mentions and the category total is 6,600, your share of voice is 22.7%. The metric can be ad spend, impressions, or mentions; what matters is that every brand is measured the same way over the same period, and that the set of brands covers most of the category.

What is excess share of voice (ESOV)?

ESOV is share of voice minus share of market, in percentage points. A brand with 22.7% of voice and 18.8% of the market has an ESOV of about +4 points. Les Binet and Peter Field, analyzing the IPA databank of effectiveness cases, reported that brands with positive ESOV tend to gain share over time and brands with negative ESOV tend to lose it. Their rule of thumb, roughly 10 points of ESOV associated with about 0.5 points of share growth a year, is a category average; the effect varies with creative quality, category, and brand size.

Which voice metric should I use?

The original ESOV research used share of advertising spend, so spend is the most defensible choice when you can estimate it for competitors. Impressions are a reasonable proxy when spend is unknown but media data is available. Mentions from social listening or PR tracking are the cheapest to gather but the noisiest, because they mix paid, earned, and complaints together. Whatever you pick, use the same source and period for every brand, and be consistent from quarter to quarter so the trend is meaningful.

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