Google Surveys

Google Surveys which was recently added to the Google Analytics 360 Suite, allows marketers to create, launch, and analyze surveys and perform market research. Google Surveys offers the ability to survey your own website or their panel of more than 10 million  online respondents.  This post will walk through the creation, deployment and analysis of both survey types. After reading, you can even launch a survey through Google Surveys on your website at no cost.

How Google Surveys Work

Google Surveys uses a network of online publishers and its popular Google Opinion Reward app on Android to build is pool of respondents. You have probably seen Google Surveys embedded on your favorite publisher sites embedded in the content or know a friend who uses the Android Opinion Reward app to get Google Play credits. Google Surveys is able to use their respondents demographic & geographic information to build representative samples. By using stratified sampling, Google Surveys is able to perform equal or better to existing probability and non-probability based Internet survey polls. Much more detail can be found on the Google Surveys Help Center.

Get Started with Google Surveys

In minutes you can create and launch a Google Survey. Start by going to surveys.google.com and log in to your Google Account.

Step 1: Select Audience & Targets

The audience types available for Google Surveys include the general population, Android users, your website and Audience Panels. Within the general population and Android users you can target specific age ranges, genders, countries and sub-regions. For our first survey we will select the general population.

Step 2: Write Questions

The questions formats available are single answer, multiple answers or a rating scale. My favorite feature of Google Surveys is the ability for you to screen respondents. Say we wanted to find out what percentage of voters for the 2016 election voted for both a Democrat and a Republican or Independent. We could create a two question survey and use the first question to screen out users who did not vote.

Here is the screening question, which allows for a single answer. Note that screen in checkbox for yes is checked.

Here is second question, which allows for multiple selections.

Step 3: Confirm Pricing

If you used a survey that screens respondents like the example above, Google Surveys will run a free trial run to measure your audience size and determine pricing. The trial run is free and takes 1 to 24 hours to complete. I got pricing with 4 hours! If you use a non-screened survey you can immediately proceed through to pricing & billing. Pricing for 1 question surveys is between 10-30 cents and 2+ question surveys are between 1-3 dollars. You only pay for complete responses, meaning the respondent must complete all questions. For 1000 responses to my survey below the cost is $100.00. Payments accepted are credit & debit cards.

Step 4: Verification

All surveys require verification and approval from Google to ensure you are in compliance. I actually found this to be extremely useful as I received a reply from Mike on the Google Surveys Team within 30 minutes. I incorporated his suggestions into my survey and my survey was live within an hour of creation.

Step 5: Analyze & Share

My survey was live within 2 hours of creation and already starting to collect respondents. There are two ways of viewing the results. The default shows the confidence intervals and uses weighting to remove bias and closely represent the target population. This is why the 9 results below do not divide evenly into the answers. You can always select the raw counts in the top corner to access the raw results.

You can do a variety of analysis directly in the tool. To interact with the data you can view my survey results: https://surveys.google.com/reporting/survey?survey=c63foe5uhh66eezuxam5qxvnum. Google Surveys allows you to make your results publicly available, private or shared with specific users. In addition you can easily export the results to a spreadsheet for deeper data mining or visualization.

Onsite Surveys

You can also use Google Surveys for targeted surveys on your site. Google Surveys even provides a free website satisfaction survey that you can use to gather voice of customer research from your own site. Get started here! You can see from the image below that you can control the timing of the first survey and configure the advanced settings to ensure you are not showing your survey too frequently.

To install simply place the code snippet in the </head> section or your site or better yet if you use Google Tag Manager you can install the tag in minutes. Using Google Tag Manager you can also easily control the scoping of the tag to only target sections of your site such as the blog, support or contact pages. You can also deploy custom website surveys at a cost of 1 cent per response.

Google Surveys 360

There is also an enterprise version available as part of the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Google Surveys 360 provides advanced targeting options that include zip codes, occupation and industry, more custom panels, and most importantly remarketing. Remarketing allows you to reengage with your users to gain additional insights. A retail store could target their users who left the site on a product detail page and ask them if they bought their product in the last 30 days, which provides rich insights into campaign performance. Also included is invoiced billing, enterprise pricing, and SLAs.

Google Surveys 360 versus Google Surveys

Source: https://support.google.com/360suite/surveys/answer/6244101?hl=en&ref_topic=7171368