It's November and the budget meeting for next year is on the calendar. Performance marketing walks in with a spreadsheet: cost per lead, cost per customer, return on spend. Brand walks in with a slide that says "building awareness".

‍

Then the CFO asks the one question the slide can't answer: "What would happen if we switched it off for a year?"

‍

That is usually where brand loses.

‍

Why brand loses the budget meeting even when it works

This is not a hunch. When Cornerstone Advisors surveyed 126 senior executives at US banks and credit unions earlier this year, not one institution said it could reliably attribute results across all the outcomes measured. Not one.

‍

The money follows the proof. According to The Financial Brand's coverage of the same survey, the share of bank marketing budgets going to brand awareness fell from 20 % in 2025 to 17 % in 2026.

‍

So budgets aren't leaving brand because it stopped working. They're leaving because performance gets measured and brand gets described. In a budget meeting, whatever has a number wins.

‍

Three things make brand hard to defend:

‍

• It gets reported in reach and impressions. Those are costs, not results.
• Its effect arrives months later, so nobody sees it in a quarterly report.
• When you switch it off, performance campaigns keep running for a while. It looks as if nothing happened. Until it does.

‍

What share of search is

Les Binet, Head of Effectiveness at the London agency adam&eveDDB, has spent decades studying why advertising works. In 2020 he presented a metric that is free, takes an afternoon and means something to everyone at the table. He calls it share of search.

‍

It is simple. Take the organic searches for your brand and divide them by the searches for all brands in your category. That's it.

‍

In his tests across cars, energy and mobile phones, share of search correlated with market share in all three categories, and it moved first. When it rises, market share tends to follow. For cars, the lead can be up to a year.

‍

The part that matters most for your budget meeting: advertising has a big short-term effect that fades quickly and a smaller long-term one that fades slowly. For sustained advertising, Binet found that about 60 % of brand searches came from the long-term effect. That is exactly the effect that never shows up in a quarterly report.

‍

How to calculate it in Google Trends

You don't need a tool or an agency for this. An afternoon is enough.

‍

1. Open Google Trends and enter your brand plus three or four closest competitors. You can compare up to five items at once.
2. Pick your terms carefully. If your brand name is also an ordinary word or is commonly misspelled, use the "topic" (company) Google suggests instead of the bare search term, and do the same for every competitor. Don't mix topics and terms in one comparison.
3. Set the country and the period. Slovakia or the Czech Republic, the last five years, monthly data.
4. Turn it into a share. Trends doesn't show search volumes. It shows a relative 0–100 index. Because all brands sit in the same chart, though, the ratio still works. Export the CSV and for each month calculate what percentage of the total belongs to you. Example: if your brand scores 40 in October and four competitors score 25, 15, 12 and 8, the total is 100 and your share of search is 40 %. A year later, the index itself doesn't matter. What matters is whether that 40 % grew or shrank.
5. Mark your campaigns. Plot when your brand campaigns ran and when they didn't.

‍

Most brands have switched brand off at some point. In this chart, you can see it.

‍

How to show it in the budget meeting

One slide. One line for you, a few for your competitors, shaded periods for your campaigns.

‍

Then answer the CFO's question with the chart instead of a sentence. "Here is what happened to our share of search the last time we went quiet. And here is what happened to the competitor who didn't."

‍

If share of search rose while you invested, you have an argument that budget builds future demand. If it didn't move, that is worth knowing too. It may not be a budget problem, but a message problem. Either way, you are now discussing data, not opinions.

‍

What the chart won't tell you

Binet himself says share of search is not a perfect predictor and by no means a silver bullet. Price affects whether a search turns into a sale, and not every search is good news. A crisis, a scandal or a service outage will push searches up too.

‍

So treat it as a direction, not courtroom proof. Check odd spikes against what happened that month. And in categories where people rarely search for brands, the data will be thin.

‍

But in front of a CFO, a direction backed by five years of data is worth far more than a slide that says "awareness".

‍

Want to draw it together?

If you'd like to build this chart with someone who knows where to look in it, book 30 minutes with Richard Schemoda. No commitment, no pitch deck. Bring your category, we'll bring Google Trends.