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Mar 4, 2016 — TrackFive

Impromptu Market Research: Google Consumer Surveys and Facebook Polls

Google Consumer Surveys and Facebook Polls are a great way to conduct spur-of-the-moment market research. Both of these programs allow you to create and distribute surveys and collect and analyze data at a reasonable price. While these platforms are not the same, they both offer great features that can allow your company or small business to complete market research on the fly.

What are Google Consumer Surveys?

Released in March of 2012, Google Consumer Surveys has become a go-to web-based platform to use for market research, surveys, and impromptu focus groups. The surveys are used as ‘soft paywalls’ for users to access premium content from publishers online. By filling out a survey, users can access otherwise locked content for free.

This tool allows businesses to reach everyday Internet users, as opposed to users that choose to participate in research surveys. Google provides a three-step survey creation process that allows you to easily use a variety of question options and targeting types to get the answers for your business decisions.

Survey Creation
A marketer creates their survey using Google’s three-step creator. Each survey can have up to 10 questions, and there are a variety of different survey question types including single answers, multiple answers, open-ended questions, and rating scales. Marketers can also use images for answer choices. Depending on where your survey is showing, videos can also be used.

Survey uses
Google Consumer Surveys can be used for most, if not all of your marketing research needs. This includes concept & product development, market trends, brand tracking, and marketing design. You can also create a survey to measure marketing campaign penetration, gauge reaction to current events, or evaluate customer satisfaction.

For agencies or research groups, Google also has custom survey portals offering the opportunity to brand your surveys and use back-end tools to completely own your research process. For this custom portal option, you will need to contact the Google Sales team.

Reach thousands of respondents
Once Google approves your survey, it will be available across a network of premium publishers including online news, reference, and entertainment sites. This also includes mobile apps, where it will be directly embedded into the content. 

Users answer questions in exchange for access to the content. This is an alternative to subscribing to content. On the Google Opinion Rewards mobile app (only available on Android), users answer surveys in exchange for Google Play store credits. When a user answers questions online, Google will infer demographic data (gender, age, and location) based on their browsing history and IP address. On the mobile app, users answer demographic answers upfront, so there’s no need to ask them.

Get your results
Almost immediately after the Google team reviews and approves your survey, results will be available. Google provides an interactive interface for analyzing your results including graphs, demographic segmentation, and insights.

When evaluating survey results, the overall view shows all the questions asked, the number of responses, the answer that was chosen most, and any available insights.Google Consumer Survey result for a single question
You can also dissect each question’s results individually. When examining each question, you can view many more details like whether the winning result was statistically significant, or if the data is weighted or not. You can also segment the data using the inferred demographic information. This allows you to compare and filter data and results by gender, age, geographic location, urban density, income, and parental status.

Google Consumer Survey Results Dashboard

Pricing
Google Consumer Surveys are priced on a per-completed-response basis. After survey creation completion, you prepay for your responses. For a 1-question survey with no targeting or screening questions, you would pay 10 cents per completed response.

Google Consumer Survey Question Creation

Below is a table, from Google, that shows the pricing structure, however, you can also view Google’s complete overview of Consumer Survey pricing.

Google Consumer Survey Pricing Structure

What are Facebook Polls?

The Facebook Polls app is another marketing tool that can be used to conduct market research. While these polls are not used as soft paywalls for premium content, they can be embedded onto a website.

Facebook Polls engage your fans, encourage more likes on your page, and expand your reach through the ability to share your polls. These polls can be shared directly with a URL on sites like LinkedIn, for example, or by inviting those that you wish to participate. Facebook Polls Survey Share Page

Facebook allows you to create fully customizable forms the way you want, including the use of images and videos. You can simply paste a YouTube video URL anywhere within your poll to embed a video.

Facebook also provides options of how you would like your poll displayed. You can stack all questions on a single page, or choose a fluid layout, which will put questions side by side if possible. You can also create polls that post one question per page instead of displaying all the questions on one page.

Facebook Polls Survey Invitation

When you finish creating your poll, not only can you add it to a tab on your page and embed it on a website, but you can actually invite your Facebook friends to answer your polls. Being on the Facebook network allows you to get results from a very specific target audience – your fans and friends. This is especially beneficial for brands that want to know what their customers or prospective customers think of them.

Facebook Polls Survey Respondents

Much like Google Consumer Surveys, Facebook offers results analysis through the use of charts and dashboards that can be exported to Excel. A feature exclusive to Facebook is the ability to see what your friends answered. From the statistics page, you can also view the origin or your poll participants. You can tell if users accessed your poll from a shared or direct URL, your timeline, a friend’s timeline, your web page, and even if one of your participants participated after being invited by one of their friends. Facebook also includes the ability to make your own custom tracking parameter.

Pricing
Facebook offers Premium Polls on a yearly subscription basis.  There are three levels of features available that range from the number of admin users allowed on an account to a custom poll URL and branding. The lowest of the premium plans start at one annual payment of $96. Facebook does not offer a free trial for these plans, nor do they offer monthly subscriptions, but they do offer a 7-day money-back guarantee.

Facebook does offer a free poll plan, however, it is severely limited offering a maximum of 40 answers, and you cannot add images. You cannot embed the poll on a website or on a Facebook page tab.

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  1. Todra says

    I’m launching a business in the next few months and I’ve been looking for ways to get the market research I need. This article is wonderful. Thanks so much!

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