What You Need to Know About Google Consumer Surveys
Written by Martin Wong on April 12, 2012
From the company that made web analytics free comes a novel service that combines consumer research with monetization of Internet content. On March 30, Google announced Google Consumer Surveys, a self-serve market research tool. This is an insanely clever idea that kills two birds with one stone: how to leverage the Internet for cheap, accurate market research, and how to let content publishers finally make some money from the valuable information they’ve been forced to offer for free.
The premise is very simple: Google Consumer Surveys lets brands who want to do consumer research create a quick 1 – 2 question micro-survey. Content publishers host the survey on their sites. When a consumer tries to access information on the content publisher’s site, a “surveywall” pops up and asks the consumer to take the survey before they can access content.
- The brand gets back from Google some aggregated results in nice, presentation-friendly formats.
- The consumer gets to read valuable content without having to pay actual money.
- The content publisher makes some money for hosting the survey.
- Google makes some money for being so darn clever.
The pricing is simple as well: Google does everything on a per-response basis. It costs the brand only $0.10 per question-response to target a representative sample of the U.S. Internet population or $0.50 per question-response for demographic targeting using inferred demographic data such as gender, age group, and US geographic region.
Image courtesy Google Consumer Surveys
What’s Good About Google Consumer Surveys
Google is using their reach to leverage a crowd-sourcing approach to market research. Rather than select a small focused audience and ask them to answer 10 pages worth of questions, the approach here is to ask a couple of simple questions and put those out to a huge audience, then run the results through some algorithms for statistical weighting.
Good response rate. During trials of Consumer Surveys, Google achieved an average response rate of 16.75% compared to the latest industry response rates of less than 1% for most Internet intercept surveys; 7-14% for telephone surveys; and 15% for Internet panels. This was due to the brief nature of the surveys, where one or two easy clicks complete the survey, and to Google’s ability to infer demographic data, making it unnecessary to add those questions to the survey.
Good accuracy. Google’s secret sauce is their statistical expertise. They take the raw response data and run it through weighting and analysis algorithms to deliver results that turned out to be more accurate than results from the Internet panels used during trials. Google reported the average absolute error for non-Google samples was 5.29% across all benchmarks, while the Google Consumer Survey samples averaged a lower 3.76%. This suggests that brands can use Google Consumer Surveys instead of traditional Internet-based panels and achieve the same, or higher, accuracy.
It’s fast. It only takes a few minutes to set up a survey, and Google takes care of the rest: putting it out to their network of publishers, data collection, and analysis. If your brand needs to be aware of trends and shifts in the consumer mindset, it’s tough to think of an easier, faster way to take the pulse of your audience.
It’s cost-effective. The Google recommendation is to go for at least 1,500 responses in order to achieve a statistically significant sample. At $0.10 each, that’s $150; at $0.50 each, that’s a $750 spend on a small survey that could deliver timely and extremely valuable insights to your business decisions.
A better business model for publishers. It’s a more viable business model over the long term for content publishers than putting up a hard “paywall” for access to content. According to David Cohn, founder of Spot.us, a journalism crowdfunding site that tried a variation of this pay-for-access model, only 1% of users were willing to pay money for content, but this number rose to 10% when they could respond instead to a survey. Furthermore, the survey takers were willing to continue taking surveys, making their long-term contribution greater than those who made one-time cash donations.
What to Keep in Mind About Google Consumer Surveys
It’s good for micro-surveys. This service is ideal for A/B testing, binary questions, or questions with a few multiple choice responses. Do you prefer this name or that name? This logo or that one? This is not the place to conduct longitudinal surveys. Think of it more as polling.
Don’t expect analysis of relationships between survey questions. The nature of Google Consumer Surveys allows only one-question or screening two-question surveys. Google provides examples of multi-question surveys, where each question is set up as a separate micro-survey but this is not the same. As long as your survey does not depend on having the same 1,500 people respond to all the micro-surveys, this should not be a problem.
Image courtesy Google Consumer Surveys
Visuals make it better. While it’s easy to set up text-based surveys, companies with attractive visuals make a better impression and get higher response rates. In some cases, if there is a design choice involved, a good visual is a must.
Image courtesy Google Consumer Surveys
It’s only available for the US population. At this moment, Google has launched Consumer Surveys for US demographics but knowing them, other markets can’t be far behind.
Sample population is not ‘representative’. Google notes that their ‘representative US population sample’ is actually representative of the US Internet-using population, who tend to be younger, better-educated, and with higher incomes. At the moment, your options for slicing demographics are limited to age, gender, and geographic region because Google infers this data from IP addresses and DoubleClick cookies. So you need to decide whether this is an issue for the type of market research you want to run.
Survey allocation depends on content publisher inventory Also, while Google does its best to optimize how surveys get allocated to content sites, there can be limitations due to publisher inventory and survey deadlines. Again, this is where their secret sauce comes into play, algorithms that compensate for these factors.
Google’s content publisher network is not as large as their display ad network, but over time as more publishers sign up, it’s reasonable to expect that these issues will go away. Google may even be able to target surveys more closely to a required demographic as a broader variety of content publishers come on board: technology, science, lifestyle, sports, arts, travel, are just a few of the verticals that come to mind. Keep in mind also that this is Google’s first iteration of Consumer Surveys. For them, it’s a proof of concept, and if the concept gains traction, expect richer functionality for surveys because the logical end game for Google is to deliver full survey capabilities.
Focus on Your Business Ecosystem – Learnings from SXSW 2012 Interactive
Written by ray.silva on April 9, 2012
Smartt’s social media and interactive technologies strategist Ray Silva has kindly allowed us to use a story from his own blog. Earlier this month Ray attended SXSW Interactive (South by Southwest), a conference for emerging technology.
This first post covers an MIT Media Lab panel discussion run by Joi Ito. He’s a pioneer in the Internet world, starting his career with technology companies in the 1980s. Now he is director of the MIT Media Lab. This discussion offered interesting insights into how the Internet is affecting the way we work and the future of business. The most important message was that the world is moving so fast that traditional business practices are becoming less effective. We’ll need to learn how to adapt in order to survive.
Avoid Overplanning
Ito opened by explaining some of what he’s seen since the beginning of the Internet. He’s noticed that in the past companies have time and time again resorted to massive time-consuming research reports in order to make the appropriate decisions. Although these are necessary for particular types of organizations such as government, others regrettably miss time-sensitive opportunities. As the world speeds up, over-planning becomes a larger problem. It now costs many organizations more to plan than just to dive in. The only way to capitalize on opportunity, and adjust to problems is to adapt quickly. This is why Agile Project Management has become increasingly popular today. Agile methodology was a large theme at SXSW this year, and Ito hit the nail in the head.
“It’s no longer about the product, it’s about the eco-system” – Joi Ito
Plan for Change as a Constant
Here’s what it boils down to: In order for organizations to survive the next 5 years of business we’re going to have to learn to adopt the idea of change. Change management isn’t just a one-time event anymore. It’s going to become a constant in the business environment. We can already see this trend in the technology start-up industry. Things move so fast that one day a business model works and the next – maybe not so much. Perhaps one model isn’t scalable. To survive and succeed we’ll need to focus on the business ecosystem.
Get Agile
Agile project management can provide some of what our organizations need because it works in iterations. Reviewing and planning faster allows important decisions and actions to happen at more appropriate times.
Focus on Environment
MIT has taken a proactive approach by opening the Media Lab division of their institution. It has a program that fosters improvisation and change. It provides a creative collaborative space to promote new ideas; funding and support for new technological discovery; coaching for individual education; and more. They focus less on individual products and more on the environment because those who work in these circumstances are more likely to reach successful outputs.
Conclusions
In reflecting on this session I’ve come to a few conclusions that are important for businesses.
Learn how Agile methodologies can improve our organizations. Every organization is different which means that they need to use different tools. Understanding the Agile frame work will give us a new tool for how to effectively manage our teams in the future.
Embrace change and improvisation. Communication is speeding up, brands are becoming more humane, and consumer demand is changing so quickly it’s hard to predict what’s next. In considering the idea of “survival of the fittest” humans and now businesses need to adapt to survive. Having the ability to proactively change and improvise under new and unknown circumstances is what will set successful businesses apart.
Be flexible with the long term. Planning is an expensive and time consuming effort. Make sure we understand when it is necessary and when it is not. There are always long term goals, but we need to be flexible in how we achieve those goals. The lessons we gain by jumping into a project and embracing serendipity may hold opportunities for the long term, so be prepared to adjust our long-term thinking.
Focus on the business eco-system (culture, space, resources, people, mentoring) not just the product. Trends and consumer demands change so quickly that it is difficult to predict how long they last and how popular they will become. Chances are that technology businesses will need to adapt, or in some cases pivot, in order to survive. Focus more on providing a team with the eco-system to succeed rather than a specific product so that when they need to they are more able to adjust.
Below are some of the cool MIT Media Lab projects that were presented after Ito’s talk:
Increase Your Click-Through Rate by 500% with Remarketing
Written by Martin Wong on March 28, 2012
Today we revisit remarketing. Our first blog on this topic was in 2010 “Using Ad Retargeting in Google Adwords.” Despite the proven effectiveness of retargeting, companies don’t seem to take advantage of it as often as they could. Remarketing or retargeting, whatever you call it, taking this additional step can increase your click-through rate by 500% and it’s available at no extra cost as part of the Google Adwords platform, so why not do it?
In this blog post, we review some of the benefits and present some retargeting tips collected from our client experiences over the past couple of years.
What is remarketing?
If you use Google Adwords, remarketing allows you to target website visitors by continuing to display your ads at appropriate times later, when they browse elsewhere on the Internet. You are in effect identifying visitors who have come to your site and then showing them tailored ads on sites throughout the Google Display Network. A little bit of retargeting code on your web pages is all you need to remarket to those visitors.
Visitors? Which visitors? You set up your target visitors via an “audience list”. You have several targeting options: from blatantly repeating your ads everywhere the visitor browses to more focused placements based on topics, keywords, ad placement, or timing. If you want, Google can help you increase your audience list by automatically adding visitors who have landed on your site through organic search or direct access.
If you haven’t done so already, read Google’s tutorial on remarketing.
What kind of business could use remarketing?
When remarketing first came out, we felt it was best for products with a longer buying cycle, where customers need to do more research or price shop. In addition to staying visible to customers while they are making up their minds, the constant reinforcement of remarketing helps drive customers from the point of feeling this product is a “wanna-have” to rather than “must-have”.
But actually, most visitors to your website won’t make up their minds right away. So any business can benefit from remarketing to reinforce your brand and remind users to come back. B2B remarketing can be very effective, especially when you combine remarketing with custom landing pages that feature different messages to target different audience segments.
Keep an eye on your results with Google Analytics, and it’s easy to track the success of your remarketing campaign, whether your goal is conversions or the engagement level of returning customers; this helps you make decisions that control your AdWords bid pricing and maintain ROI.
Six Tips for Remarketing ROI
- Create a ‘just purchased’ list. Visitors who followed through with a purchase are good targets for cross-selling. If Rita just bought some great evening shoes, she may respond well to a remarket ad for evening bags, with a discount if she makes the purchase within the next 7 days. You can set up this campaign to target this list for up to 7 days. You can also use this list to make sure you’re not remarketing to Rita with ads for more evening shoes.
- Create a dropouts list. Work those audience lists. Create a list of visitors who started adding to their shopping cart but then dropped out. These are high potential prospects who had second thoughts. Perhaps they didn’t like the shipping costs, or felt they had to shop around some more, or perhaps they just got distracted during the purchase process. Remind them about your site and help them reconsider with remarketing ads that offer discounts, free shipping, or a bonus.
- Remarket by brand or product type. If you carry different brands of product (shoes) or sell a range of products (shoes, handbags, and accessories), put remarketing code in pages by brand or by product type. Therefore, if Joe has been to your Nike page, whenever he navigates to another Nike page or sports footwear page, he will see your ad for your Nike sports footwear. If Jessica has been on your handbag pages, she will continue to see your ads for purses. It’s especially effective if your remarketing ads offer specials.
- Offer an incentive. It costs less to attract a repeat customer than to capture a new customer. Take some of those savings and give customers a better reason to come back.
- Experiment. Be relevant. Try different messages and campaigns as well as different combinations of audience lists. Stay current with trends or seasonal product opportunities. There is no such thing as a silver bullet but you will be able to find some messages that resonate better with certain audience lists. Keep on trying until you know what works.
- Create custom landing pages. Custom pages or micro-sites are a real help when your main website is constrained to certain designs or too difficult to manage for quick response to marketing campaign needs. When you remarket, you can zero in on a slice of your target audience, so why not invest in a micro-site or custom landing page that speaks directly and more personally to that customer segment?
