As companies of all sizes and industries continue to focus on building their online presence, it is important to know the tools that are readily available for your use when trying to advertise online. Both Google and Facebook offer a variety of free tools to help you discover and better understand how to market your products or services to the right audience.
Here are the four free market research tools we often use as part of this process:
Facebook Audience Insights
What is it?
Facebook Audience Insights was developed to help marketers learn more about their target audience. This is accomplished based on specific targeting through interests, purchase behavior, location, etc.
By looking at Facebook Insights, you can also determine the most optimal day of the week and time of day to post. This recommendation is based on the type of content that attracts your audience based on their other page likes and traffic patterns to your page.
All of this information can help you track user interaction with your page so that you can further understand and optimize your most qualified audience.
Why use it?
Facebook Audience Insights is a tool that lets you learn more about your target audience. Facebook tracks certain information and allows you to see recurring patterns in user behavior from two different audience types: people on Facebook (the general audience on Facebook) or people connected to your page or event (including saved audiences that you have already created in Facebook).
Audience Insights allows you to collect anonymous information such as:
- Demographics — Age, education level, relationship status, job title, etc.
- Page likes — The top pages people like.
- Location and language — Where people live and what languages they speak.
- Facebook usage — How frequently people are logging onto Facebook and from what devise they are doing so.
Google Keyword Planner
What is it?
Keywords are the connection point between what you are offering and what your audience is actively searching for. They help narrow your audience and get your ads in front of the right people. Google Ads offers a keyword planner that will allow you to find new keywords applicable to your product or service. You can also see search volume and other historical metrics for your keywords, plus forecasts for how they might perform in the future!
Why use it?
Keyword Planner is a valuable resource that aids in getting you marketed towards the right audience by generating new keyword ideas and bid estimations that get your PPC campaign off the ground. It is crucial to optimizing your ad campaigns and provides benefits such as:
- Keywords: find new keyword related to your product or service
- Monthly searches: allows you to see the average monthly search for a keyword
- Average Bid: you can see what others are bidding on keywords. This will help determine cost and therefore where to allocate your budget effectively
- Create new campaigns: Extensive keyword research can lead to new campaign ideas. Use your drafted keyword plan to create new campaigns as well as further optimize the ones currently running
Google Consumer Insights
What is it?
Consumer Insights in Google allows you a fast, accurate, and affordable way to do quantitative market research online. Google Insights provides features like shopping insights to see which brands and products are popular in your field. Find My Audience will help you build an audience profile to discover the audience that matters most to your business
Consumer insights is a quick and easy way to collect real time data that shows you the habits of your audience.
Why use it?
Consumer Insights can help you learn:
- Insights into your competitors
- How to personalize your ads
- How to understand the shifts in consumer behavior
Google Trends
What is it?
Google Trends is a resource for search trends. It shows you how often a search term is entered into Google’s search engine. This allows you to gauge your content and keyword research upon current trends.
Why use it?
- You can see worldwide trends that can help you understand what works best for your demographic
- In PPC, it is useful to base both your keyword and negative keyword lists off of relevant and irrelevant search terms that are trending amongst your audience
- In SEO, learning relevant search terms can help you discover what is trending in your audience and help drive traffic to your website.
Growing and optimizing your ad campaigns requires consistent monitoring and research. These provided tools are easy and free to use, essential to maximizing your budget, and helpful in learning more about the trends and habits of your target audience.
