How to use Google Plus for market research and audience insights

Google Plus, now defunct since April 2019, was once a social networking platform by Google. While Google Plus itself is no longer active, it was a valuable tool for market research and audience insights due to its integration with Google’s ecosystem and its specific user base. However, while discussing how to use Google Plus for market research isn’t applicable today, you can still harness the broader Google ecosystem for market research and audience insights effectively.

Instead of focusing on Google Plus, let’s explore Google’s current tools and platforms that can provide valuable market research and audience insights. These include Google Analytics, Google Trends, Google Ads, Google Surveys, and YouTube Analytics. Each of these platforms offers robust data collection and analysis opportunities to better understand your audience, competitors, and trends in your industry.

1. Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a powerful tool for gathering audience insights. It provides in-depth information about your website visitors, their behavior, and their interaction with your content. You can use it for market research in the following ways:

Audience Demographics: Discover who your visitors are in terms of age, gender, location, and interests. This helps you tailor your marketing strategies and content to suit your target audience.
Acquisition Channels: Find out where your traffic is coming from—whether it’s organic search, social media, referral traffic, or paid ads. This information helps you understand which marketing channels are most effective for your business.
User Behavior: Analyze user behavior, such as which pages they visit, how much time they spend on your site, and where they drop off. Understanding this can help improve user experience and increase engagement.
Conversions and Goals: Track conversions and set goals to measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Knowing which marketing strategies are leading to conversions can inform future decision-making.

Actionable Insight Example: If Google Analytics shows that a majority of your visitors are coming from social media, but they leave after viewing only one page, you may want to adjust your social media content to make it more engaging or direct visitors to more valuable landing pages.

2. Google Trends

Google Trends allows you to explore what topics and keywords are trending in real time. This is a highly effective tool for market research, especially when you’re looking to understand consumer interests and popular search terms.

Keyword Research: You can see the popularity of specific keywords over time, helping you identify rising trends in your industry. This is especially useful for creating content or optimizing your website for SEO.
Geographic Insights: Google Trends provides data on where certain search queries are most popular, helping you target your marketing efforts more effectively by region.
Comparison of Search Terms: Google Trends allows you to compare different search terms to see which ones are gaining more traction. This can help you decide where to focus your content marketing efforts.

Actionable Insight Example: If you’re in the fitness industry and you notice that “HIIT workouts” are trending in specific regions, you can create location-targeted content or ads around HIIT, capitalizing on the increased interest.

3. Google Ads Keyword Planner

Google Ads Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for conducting keyword research and understanding market demand. Even if you don’t run paid advertising, this tool offers valuable insights into what users are searching for.

Search Volume Data: See how often specific keywords are searched, which can inform both your SEO strategy and content creation efforts.
Keyword Suggestions: Find related keywords that are relevant to your industry, which you might not have considered. This helps broaden your content and keyword strategy.
Competition Insights: Understand how competitive certain keywords are in terms of paid ads. While this is mainly for advertising, it can give you an idea of how difficult it may be to rank for these terms organically.

Actionable Insight Example: If you’re launching a new product and notice that search volume for a particular related keyword is high but competition is low, you can prioritize creating content around that term to gain an early advantage in organic search.

4. Google Surveys

Google Surveys offers a way to gather consumer feedback quickly and efficiently. You can create custom surveys targeted to specific demographics and locations, making it an ideal tool for direct market research.

Targeted Questions: You can ask questions that are directly relevant to your business, products, or services and receive responses from a targeted audience.
Demographic Targeting: Google Surveys allows you to target respondents based on specific demographic criteria, such as age, gender, and location, ensuring that you get insights from the people most relevant to your market.
Consumer Preferences: Use surveys to gather data on consumer preferences, purchase behavior, or product satisfaction. This is highly valuable for fine-tuning your products or services.

Actionable Insight Example: If you’re considering launching a new product, you can run a survey to gauge interest and get feedback from potential customers before committing to full-scale production.

5. YouTube Analytics

YouTube, being the second largest search engine, offers valuable data through YouTube Analytics. If you’re creating video content as part of your marketing strategy, YouTube Analytics provides insights into how your content is performing and who is watching it.

Demographics: YouTube Analytics provides detailed demographic data, including age, gender, and geographic location of your viewers.
Engagement Metrics: Analyze watch time, average view duration, and audience retention to understand which videos resonate most with your audience.
Traffic Sources: Understand how viewers are finding your videos—whether through search, suggested videos, or external sources like social media.

Actionable Insight Example: If you notice that a certain type of video content has higher engagement rates or longer watch times, you can create more of that type of content to retain viewers and grow your audience.

6. Google My Business Insights

If you run a local business, Google My Business Insights can provide important data on how users find your business and interact with your Google listing.

Search Queries: See what search terms people use to find your business, helping you optimize your Google My Business listing with relevant keywords.
Customer Actions: Track how often users take actions such as visiting your website, requesting directions, or calling your business.
Reviews and Feedback: Monitor customer reviews and feedback to understand what your customers like or dislike about your products or services.

Actionable Insight Example: If you notice that many users are requesting directions to your business from a particular area, you could target that location with local advertising or promotions.

Conclusion

While Google Plus may no longer be available for market research, Google’s ecosystem still provides a wealth of tools to help you gain audience insights and understand market trends. By leveraging Google Analytics, Google Trends, Google Ads Keyword Planner, Google Surveys, YouTube Analytics, and Google My Business Insights, you can gather data to inform your marketing strategies, improve content, and better serve your customers.

These tools not only help you understand who your audience is and what they’re looking for but also guide your efforts in optimizing marketing campaigns, improving your product offerings, and creating more engaging content. By utilizing these resources, you can make data-driven decisions that enhance your business performance and drive growth.