Golden Visa Index : Methodology

What the Index measures

The La Vida Golden Visa Index is the investment migration industry’s first leading indicator of future demand based on actual search data.

It measures global search demand for golden visas. That is residency and citizenship by investment, in all the terms investors use to describe it. It is built from a decade of La Vida’s own paid search activity on Google, covering more than 100 million relevant search impressions across 400,000+ distinct search terms used by prospective investors. From the first quarter of 2016 to the present. The base year is 2016 = 100.

The Investment Migration Council estimates that our industry generates approximately $20 billion a year. In some microstates and island economies it accounts for between 10% and 40% of GDP. Until now the industry has had no forward measure of its own demand based on investor intent.

The Index is a measure of demand, not of applications, approvals, capital raised or market value. It shows what prospective investors are researching, when, and from where. It shows it a long time in advance, often years ahead of government statistics on approvals and investment.

How it is built

The Index rests on a measure Google provides to advertisers and to no one else: actual search impression share.

For every search La Vida bids on, Google reports both the number of impressions our advertising received and the share of the available impressions that represents. Dividing one by the other gives derived market — Google’s own estimate of the total searches available on that term.

To have access to the share of impressions advertisers need a consistently high advertising share. Else Google does not provide this information.

Further construction rules on the index:

Matched Years: Chain-linked on a matched sample. Each year is compared with the previous year using only those search terms carrying demand in both. A term that appears in one year and not the other cannot register as growth. The exception to this is program changes below. This is the construction national statistical offices use for price and volume indices. It is what prevents the Index from inflating due to any wider search term usage over time.

Full Year: Terms enter at their first full year and leave after their last. A search term joins the series only once it has been measured for a complete year, and drops out after its last complete year. The Index therefore cannot rise because we widened our own coverage. The exception to this again is program changes below.

New and ceased programs: These are included in the data. We consider any new program launch to be a widening and an increase in the market and in search demand. Likewise any drop off in search for ceased programs continues to count.

Quarterly figures: These are anchored to the annual. Each quarter is expressed relative to the average quarter of its own year, then scaled to that year’s annual value. The four quarters of any year average exactly to the annual figure which is published. Quarterly figures are not published at this stage but may be referred to in updates between annual publication.

What is Published

La Vida is a commercial firm, not a statistical agency, and the dataset is proprietary. We publish the method, the base and the judgements that materially affect the results. We do not publish data beyond this to support our findings except for that provided in commentary.

How we are able to build it

This measure requires something unusual: continuous, large-scale advertising across the entire vocabulary of an industry, sustained for a decade.

Google discloses competitive impression share only to advertisers, only where a sustained presence exists, and only for the periods and terms on which that presence was maintained. La Vida has bid across the this data set since 2016 and held the largest share of this search market throughout this period. The information Google provides to us shows our presence to be greater than the next three advertisers combined across this data set spanning 10+ years. That is what makes the index possible.

Alternative approaches rely on third-party keyword tools, which estimate search volume by extrapolating from clickstream panels. Impression share is different in kind: it is Google’s own count of the auctions it actually ran on a scale (100 million actual searches) that provides credibility far beyond any third party keyword tool.