Target Your Surveys with Google Stalker
OK, using the word stalker instead of remarketing lists is harsh, but it perfectly conveys the idea behind Google Consumer Surveys’ (GCS) latest innovation for market research. You can use cookie lists from web pages to target people based on specific content they are viewing.
Want to survey people who were on your website last week looking at organic fertilizers for home gardening? Compile a “remarketing cookie list” of visitors. Submit it to Google. They will track those visitors for you, just like they do when serving up targeted ads. But this time, Google waits patiently as visitors travel around the Internet, hoping at least some of them will click onto one of GCS’ publishing partner websites. When somebody does, BLAMO! To gain free access, the visitor has to answer customized survey questions from you.
The odds of those visitors actually landing on a site in GCS’ publishing network is small. And the odds of that visitor being willing to answer your survey questions is small. Putting it all together, current estimates are that a cookie list of 1,000 visitors will yield one survey respondent. If you want a relatively small survey sample of 100 respondents, that means you’ll need a list of 100,000 visitors. Obviously this is not a great way to find those super-hard-to-reach low incidence populations.
The other downside is that the capabilities of Google Surveys are extremely limited. We often start thinking GCS would be a perfect, low-cost way for us to do a quick survey, and we do, indeed, use Google Surveys occasionally. But nine times out of ten times, we give up because GCS just can’t handle what a professional researcher needs.
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