Behind the Scenes with Dylan Lorimer, Google Surveys Product Lead

Google Surveys, a new product from Google Analytics Solutions, launched on Wednesday. Google Surveys makes it easy to get fast, reliable opinions from consumers on mobile devices and across the internet. The goal, as always, is to help you make more informed business decisions, understand your marketing impact, and take the pulse of your brand.

Today we're excited to talk with Dylan Lorimer, Lead Product Manager for Google Surveys, about how this product fits in with the rest of Google Analytics Solutions and what the future looks like.

Q: What is Google Surveys?
Lorimer: Google Surveys is a online market research tool for making fast, informed, data-driven business decisions. It gives businesses access to conduct research against a representative sample of users on the web and on our mobile app, Google Opinion Rewards. It’s the evolution of Google Consumer Surveys, a product that’s been in the market since 2012 and fields 1M surveys a week.

Q: How does Google Surveys differ from Google Surveys 360?
Lorimer: Google Surveys 360 is our enterprise research product; it's a fully-supported research tool that is integrated into the Google Analytics 360 Suite. Users get advanced audience targeting, dedicated support and consolidated billing, all of which make it easy for big organizations to use. Google Surveys has fewer advanced targeting features, but it's a pay-as-you-go product so that anyone can use it. Google Surveys is currently available in U.S., Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Mexico, Japan, Australia, Brazil, France, Spain, Italy, and the Netherlands. Google Surveys 360 is available in U.S. and Canada.

Q: How is Google Surveys different from other market research tools?
Lorimer: Traditional market research research often involves long, time-intensive surveys answered by individuals who have signed up to respond to surveys for compensation. The process is typically slow, costly, and out of reach for most businesses who want to make a quick and informed decision. Google Surveys aims to make high-quality research more accessible, and to bring the customer voice into the process of media performance measurement.

Q: Why is Google Surveys now part of Google Analytics Solutions?
Lorimer: Google Analytics Solutions is a set of powerful tools that helps marketers use data to understand their consumers and how they behave. Google Surveys bridges the gap between metrics-based performance measurement and the need many marketers have to get qualitative feedback from their customers on their cross-channel, cross-media marketing campaigns. Google Surveys has grown on its own over the past few years. When we saw the investment Google was making with Google Analytics Solutions to empower the marketer — something we’ve been focused on with Google Consumer Surveys for a few years now — it felt like the obvious choice to provide a missing tool in the portfolio.

Q: What are some examples of how customers are using Google Surveys?
Lorimer: YouVisit, a leading virtual reality company, just used us to find out how many of their clients were aware of virtual reality. They suspected a significant number of consumers were at least aware of the concept, and that some percentage would want to try it. But to convince clients to invest in virtual reality content, YouVisit needed hard facts. How many people wanted to try virtual reality? How many were even aware of it? YouVisit turned to Google Surveys to gather those numbers, and they were pleasantly surprised. A statistically significant sample from Google Surveys let them extrapolate that 23 million Americans had already tried virtual reality. With this data, YouVisit can confidently educate clients on virtual reality’s power to engage consumers.

 “Google Surveys empowers YouVisit to accomplish our mission by better understanding what the end customer wants in immersive experience — so we can create those experiences that emotionally engage, that are impactful, that drive a real-life action.” 
– Suzanne Sanders, Senior Marketing Communications Manager, YouVisit 


Q: What does the future look like for Google Surveys?
Lorimer: The future is bright! We see immense potential and we're excited about new ways we can help marketers and even developers reach their target audience, based on unique signals like location, behavior, and ad exposure. We're already serving surveys to over 10 million respondents, so in some ways pulling insights from that is a big data challenge for us — which is the kind of puzzle we like to solve best at Google. So there’s a lot we think we can do to be proactive about providing actionable data to our customers. Google Surveys as a research tool is just the beginning.

We hope you found this additional information useful. Ready to get started with Google Surveys? Learn more at g.co/surveys.

Happy surveying!