Share of Voice (SOV)

Apple renamed Share of Voice to Impression Share in 2026. If you are looking for the metric as it appears in your campaigns today, including how it is calculated and reported, see Impression Share. This page covers Share of Voice as a concept and what replaced it.

Share of Voice (SOV) is a marketing metric that measures a brand’s visibility compared to competitors within a channel, market, or keyword set. In app marketing, it described the percentage of times an app’s ad was shown to users relative to the total opportunities available.

In Apple Ads, this metric is now called Impression Share. The concept below still holds; the naming, the reporting, and the level of detail have changed.

Why does Share of Voice matter?

Share of Voice answers a question that rank and spend cannot. Two advertisers can pay a similar cost per tap on the same keyword while one appears on most searches and the other appears rarely.

It provides a competitive benchmark rather than a measure of your own activity. Unlike organic rank or keyword popularity, which describe individual positions or demand, share of voice describes relative dominance: how much of a term’s available visibility you hold against everyone else competing for it.

That makes it useful for four things, all of which still apply under the new name:

• Competitive insight: Whether you are gaining or losing ground against competitors on a term.
• Budget allocation: Where more spend would buy more visibility, and where a keyword is close to saturated.
• Brand protection: Whether competitors are appearing on your own branded terms.
• Growth opportunities: A low share on a high-value keyword signals untapped potential.

How Share of Voice was calculated

Share of voice was expressed as a straightforward percentage:

SOV = (Your impressions ÷ Total impressions for the market or keyword) × 100

If an app received 5,000 impressions out of 25,000 available for a keyword, its share of voice was 20%. A competitor at 60% held three times as much of that keyword’s visibility.

This formula still describes the concept accurately, and it remains a reasonable way to think about visibility in any channel. What it no longer describes is how Apple reports the metric. Two differences matter:

• Values are banded at the top. Apple returns an exact percentage up to 90%. Anything higher is reported as a 91 to 100% range rather than a single figure, so a clean number is not always available.
• One number became two. Since Apple expanded ad placements in App Store search results, the metric is reported separately for the first ad position and for all ad positions.

For how the metric is calculated and reported today, see Impression Share.

What changed in Apple Ads

The change came with the Apple Ads Platform API in 2026.

Three practical consequences:

• Historical data is unaffected

Impression Share (First Ad Position) is the same measurement that was reported as Apple Share of Voice, so figures either side of the rename are comparable.

• Reporting is weekly

The data reflects the previous week rather than the current day, so it does not respond immediately to a bid change.

• Rank works differently

Because rank is now an integer rather than a value from a fixed list, filters and automation conditions built on it take a number you enter.

The reason for the split is worth knowing. App Store search results carried a single ad slot for most of the format’s history. Once more than one ad could appear for a query, one figure could no longer describe where an ad had been shown. See App Store ad placements for more on that change.

Share of Voice outside Apple Ads

The term remains in general use. Media planning, PR measurement, social listening, and search advertising on other platforms all use share of voice to describe visibility relative to competitors, each with its own definition of what counts as an available impression.

Because of that, share of voice is best treated as a concept with platform-specific implementations rather than a single standard metric. When comparing figures across channels, the denominator is usually where the definitions diverge.

Key takeaway

Share of Voice describes how visible a brand is compared to its competitors, and the idea remains sound. In Apple Ads, the metric is now called Impression Share and is reported by ad position, which gives a more precise read on the same question. For the current metric, its calculation, and how to improve it, see Impression Share.