Google has done it again, changing the accessibility of an age-old service and making it easy to use, full-featured and cost-effective. They recently launched a new product named Google Consumer Surveys.
Consumer Surveys Have Always Been Invaluable
Consumer surveys have long been used by businesses and advertising agencies to help them understand the consumer's opinion of a product, service, or brand. Understanding your market's psychological triggers, pain points, desires, and opinions are immensely important to building a successful business. Unfortunately the work and preparation required to gain this insight has traditionally required costly experts, intense preparation and a significant period of time in order to gain statistically relevant results.
Now Consumer Surveys are Accessible
With Google's new offering, you can now gain statistically significant insight for as little as $0.10 per response—about 1/10th the cost of similar quality research—within a very short period of time. Google has provided a platform that allows you to poll a sample demographic within the US to gain their insights.
The following video shows how this service could be used to determine what consumers think of two different packaging designs, what features they deem most important in a product, and how much they would be willing to pay for that product as well as how the service works:
This new offering could be of tremendous value to small businesses. Google boasts 100x higher response rates than the industry average (15-20% compared to 0.1 - 2%) which can result in incredibly fast turn-around times on your data; days rather than weeks. Their tools for analysis of the data are great, as expected, with simple graphs and charts that visually showcase the results, as well as more advanced insights such as preferences by age, gender, geography, etc. For a premium, you are also able to choose a custom demographic to hear only from consumers of a certain gender, within a certain age range, or within a certain geographic region. You can also choose to use a screening question for your custom demographic.
Can They Replace Traditional Market Research?
There are, however, some drawbacks to the current design of the service. Currently Consumer Surveys are offered only in the US - different regions may have different thoughts or biases. Surveys are also created and charged for by the question, so in order to get statistically relevant results you will need to spend a minimum of $200.00 per question, which will get you 1,000 responses to each. And while the analysis tools are good, there are many reasons for a specific outcome in a survey and a proper analysis of the data to see what is really being suggested is one of the main reasons traditional market research is so valuable.
So our advice is to take this for what it’s worth; an entry-level market research tool that is usable by anyone, and affordable to all.
We Put it to the Test
As with many new services, we put Google Consumer Surveys to the test since we think this is an invaluable tool for both our business, and likely yours. Check out our followup post which goes over creating a survey in depth, along with a link to play with our sample survey data.