Doing market surveys with Google? Of course you can, indeed: you must! But DIY can be a gamble.
One of the most trusted sources for online market research is Google, the most widely used search engine in the world and packed with valuable information for companies in any industry.
So many people, however, do not know how to best intercept the information… Or they think that just browsing Google Trends is enough to get the most appropriate answers to their marketing questions.
Are you, too, wondering how to do market research with Google? Surely you’re searching far and wide for the information you need to proceed with a kick-ass survey.
You will get your answers today, but we want to anticipate that, without using the right tools (and without the proper knowledge to make the best use of them), market surveys can lead you to make completely or partially wrong business decisions .
This may sound like heresy to you, and yet it really is! In the course of this in-depth study you will find out why we make this claim, but also how Google Trends helps us conduct really effective market research.
What is Google Trends and why is it critical for market research?
Google Trends is a free Google tool that has completely replaced the famous (but long defunct) Google Insight For Search.
As you can well imagine, this online tool has the function of showing search trends, that is, trending searches.
More specifically, it shows how often a specific term is searched on Google, in a given time period, compared to the total volume of searches.
It is a fundamental tool for market research because it allows us to:
- Conducting comparative keyword research.
- Uncover peaks related to search volume for specific keywords (typically, peaks are triggered by particular events, as we saw in the analysis of data on racism in Italy).
- Know the geographic information of users performing certain searches.
- Find out what changes in search volume a keyword has undergone over time, based on geographic area, period, industry, and search type.
- Investigating search trends on Google, Google Images, Google Shopping, Google News and Youtube.
- Compare search statistics related to several different terms.
And much more.
In summary: thanks to Google Trends we can investigate a given topic to find very specific answers to the marketing questions we need to solve.
Read also: Statistical sample used in market research: here’s why it is now obsolete
What marketing questions can we solve through the use of Google Trends?
Google Trends allows us to answer important marketing questions from our client companies, such as the following concerns:
- What are the trends, current and future, in the target market?
- What are consumers’ favorite brands?
- What do customers buy most by season and time of year?
- Which products or services are preferred by target customers and why?
- What are target customers looking for about competing companies?
- What do target customers talk about most and why?
- Where in the market are the client company’s and competitors’ brands?
And many, many more questions.
Knowing the precise answer to these questions allows us to obtain salient information regarding the competition, the brand of the company for which we conduct the survey, and the target customers.
As we have anticipated, however, you must pay close attention to DIY. Google Trends might seem like an easy tool to use, but without the proper knowledge it could lead you down the wrong path.
Why avoid “do-it-yourself” market research, whether with Google Trends or other tools?
The reason is very simple, and it goes beyond a measly “To each his job.”
Conducting market research is much more complicated than it might seem, and although Google Trends provides us with a great deal of help, we need to know how to use it to the fullest (including through appropriate software) in order to obtain accurate and truly useful information.
Companies that conduct market research on their own, first of all, do not think impartially and, secondly, tend to conduct a cursory analysis.
Such an investigation may mislead them. A very serious prospect considering that the goal of market surveys is to find answers to business and marketing problems.
If done in the wrong way, what could help a business take off and rout competitors becomes what could sink the company.
Read also: Online market research VS surveys and interviews: we have a winner!
In conclusion
Using Google Trends as a source for market analysis, either alone or in conjunction with other sources, allows us to help your company make the right business decisions aimed at growth and success.
Google is a reliable source because that is where both your target customers and your competitors are expressed.
Do you want to know what we at Central Marketing Intelligence, a market research agency, can do for you?
Contact us now for a free, no-obligation consultation-we are here to help!
