Average Monthly Search Volume

Search volume is a foundational input for calculating impressions, and by extension clicks and spend.

Adthena uses Google’s average monthly search volume as one of its underlying data sources. The search volume is updated once a month as it becomes available from Google. 

Frequency

Is the % of appearances Adthena sees a competitor out of all times searched (includes the number of times users searched for a term but no ads were shown), weighted by search volume. Note that frequency only includes the terms that a competitor appears on. 

Example

If Adthena searches for "black dress" 100 times and sees competitor retail-brand.com showing an advert on 50 of those occasions, then retail-brand.com will have a frequency = 50% on that specific term.

If retail-brand.com is appearing on multiple terms, then the aforementioned % will be weighted according to the average monthly search volume of each term. 

Example

Using the two search terms “black dress” and “black cocktail dress,” which have average search volumes of 3,000 and 300 searches per month respectively:

Retail-brand.com appears 100% of the time for “black dress” and 50% of the time for “black cocktail dress.” Instead of simply averaging these frequencies to get 75%, we weight them based on search volume. Since “black dress” is searched 10 times more often, the weighted frequency is 95%.

How to calculate:

• Term 1: “black dress”
  • Frequency:  100%  or  1.0
  • Search Volume:  3,000  searches per month
• Term 2: “black cocktail dress”
  • Frequency:  50%  or  0.5
  • Search Volume:  300  searches per month

The weighted frequency for retail-brand.com appearing on both “black dress” and “black cocktail dress,” considering the search volumes of each term, is approximately 95%.

Estimated Impressions

1. We calculate the frequency that we see your relevant competitors on your relevant search terms.
2. Using frequency (for each competitor and each search term) and search volume for each search term, we calculate the number of impressions of a competitor on a search term for the given period.
3. If you then sum the impressions of all search terms we've seen a competitor on, you will get the total number of impressions of the competitor for the given period. This is Estimated Impressions.

Using the above example, Estimated Impressions is the sum of Frequency x Average Monthly Search Volume (for each competitor and each search term).

Share of Impressions

= Estimated Impressions / ALL available impressions. The latter is the total Google search volume for all relevant search terms. A competitor who appears every time Adthena searches for a specific term will have 100% Impression Share.

Estimated CTR & Average CPC

Adthena uses a complex machine learning model to estimate, nightly, both click-through rate (CTR) and cost per click (CPC) for every search term, for every competitor, in every position they have been seen appearing that day.

The model continuously learns from the 10 terabytes of new data Adthena collects daily. The key inputs are:

• Country — which market the activity is occurring in
• Device — with a separate model running for mobile
• Competitor profile — who the competitor is and the size of their search presence, including the number of unique search terms they've appeared on across both paid and organic listings, their overlap, and the frequency of their appearances
• Search term — what the term is, and whether it is branded or generic
• Brand ownership — whether the advertiser is the brand owner for that search term
• Competitive density — how many advertisers are competing on the search term
• Position — whether the advertiser's most frequent position is above the fold (top or bottom of the page)
• Timing — the time of day and days of the week the advertiser typically appears on that term
• Page composition — whether other elements on the page (extensions, knowledge boxes, image search, PLAs, comparison boxes) could draw clicks away from the ad
• Click aggregation — clicks from site links and call buttons are combined with the main ad when calculating CTR

Estimated Clicks

Multiply Estimated Impressions by the CTR for the competitor and the search term. At the end of this procedure you'll get the Estimated Clicks for each competitor on all of the relevant search terms they've been seen on.

Example:

Let’s say a search term gets 1,000 searches per month, and a competitor’s ad appears 60% of the time, generating 600 impressions. If they always appear in position 2 with a 5% click-through rate (CTR), that results in 30 clicks per month.

The next week, the competitor’s ad is seen 80% of the time, fluctuating between position 2 (70%) and position 3 (30%). The CTR is now estimated at 6% for position 2 and 3.5% for position 3.

To calculate impressions:

To estimate clicks:

Estimating clicks becomes more complex with additional competitors and search terms with different search volumes and competitors.

Share of Clicks

= Estimated Clicks / Sum (Estimated Clicks for all relevant competitors).

Share of Spend

A competitor’s spend is estimated by multiplying their Estimated Clicks for each search term by their Estimated CPC for that search term. The total spend for all competitors can then be calculated and each competitors spend divided by the total is their Share of (the total) Spend.