By Marc Apple

You may not have realized it at the time, but chances are you’ve taken a demographically targeted Google Consumer Survey upon visiting one of your favorite sites. The good news is that you can start using this innovative platform today to expedite your market research. Say you’re launching soon and you’re looking to see how to best market to women between the ages of 20 and 40. With a Google Consumer Survey, all you have to do is create a short survey to be shown to your target audience.

This survey is then integrated into the Google Consumer Survey network. Various online publishers display the targeted ad (as determined by browser history and other analytics) as a gateway to their premium content. You set a budget and pay for each survey answered, usually somewhere between 10 and 50 cents per response, similar to Google Adwords.

With this platform, there’s no need to commission research through phone calls or eblasts — the surveys are immediately selected by the network’s smart algorithm to connect to your demographic (age, gender, geography).

In other words, the budget you may have set aside to hire a market research firm can be put into a more immediate response. Multiple types of questions are available, such as multiple choice, image selection, and open-ended formats, allowing you to survey anything from customer satisfaction ratings to market trends.

Of course, getting people to take a survey is just half the battle — Google also provides tools to breakdown the collected data. The results come with internal reports and analytics, along with exportable data to a CSV file. The built-in Insights option breaks data down into easy-to-read charts and segments.

Google has innovated the way people handle online marketing thanks to Adsense and Adwords. With Google Consumer Survey, this innovation has extended out to market research. Thanks to per-survey costing and immediate results, businesses now have greater researching flexibility and reach than ever before. In short, if you have a question you want answered by a specific type of person, Google Consumer Surveys make it possible.

Marc Apple is a Strategist at Forward Push Media and VP of Marketing Strategy for the San Francisco American Marketing Association.