Developer(s) Google | Type Statistics, Surveys | |
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Initial release 29 March 2012 (2012-03-29) Operating system Website www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/ | ||
Google Surveys (formerly Google Consumer Surveys) is a business product by Google that facilitates customized market research. The product was designed by Google as an alternative to internet pay walls for websites that publish content. The program was launched by several online publishers such as Pandora, AdWeek, and the New York Daily News.
Contents
For survey creators
Google Surveys provides both a web interface with which to design the survey as well as the audience that takes the survey. The survey questions are subject to some requirements in length and content.
The survey creators are the source of money in the model.
Monetization by Google
Google receives money from business customers such as market research firms and small businesses who create the surveys. In addition to the paid services, Google also offers a free survey for websites with predefined questions targeted at people visiting the website.
For publishers
Every time a user responds to a survey, the publishers earn US$0.05.
For consumers
The consumer surveys work as a "soft paywall" (also called a "surveywall") for websites offering premium content.
Users visiting these websites have the option of responding to a survey to access content for free.
History
The product was launched on March 29, 2012.
On February 19, 2015, Google announced Consumer Surveys as a platform for publishers to monetize their online content. Initially, this platform will be available only for publishers from USA, UK and Canada. Publishers payments are made through the AdSense payment system, but the platform has its own management and reporting console.
On October 19, 2016, Google announced that it had renamed the product from Google Consumer Surveys to Google Surveys and was moving it to part of the Google Analytics product suite.
Reception
Notable uses of Google Surveys include voter information tools and behavior surveys of holiday travelers. Google Surveys published voter opinion polls leading up to the 2012 US presidential elections. According to New York Times' blogger and statistician Nate Silver, the Google Surveys' election polls were ranked second in terms of reliability and lack of bias in predicting election results.
Pew Research Center has conducted a series of tests to evaluate Google Surveys in consultation with Google. In November 2012, Pew independently published an analysis of the results up to that point which stated in part that a "comparison of several demographic questions asked by Pew Research indicates that the Google Consumer Surveys sample appears to conform closely to the demographic composition of the overall internet population".
Google Surveys has been compared to SurveyMonkey (which also offers both a survey creation interface as well as a way to purchase an audience), where it was praised for its low cost per response but was found to have less flexibility in designing the survey.
Google has also reviewed Google Surveys in a white paper, concluding that "Google Consumer Surveys can be used in place of more traditional Internet-based panels without sacrificing accuracy" while also stating that "[s]ince Google Consumer Surveys only allows one-question or screening two-question surveys, analysis of the relationships between survey questions are difficult or sometimes not even possible".