The main reason why people use pay per click advertising is to gain contextual traffic onto one’s landing page to gain that person a conversion which will depend on the type of landing page being used. However, this does not mean that PPC cannot be used for other reasons. For example, a great way to use PPC is as a form of market research for your product/service while it is in the development stage of its product life cycle. This is because you will be able to find what traffic will gain you the best conversions before you set your PPC campaign up for when your product is in the introductory stage. As well as this, you can learn from your PPC traffic and understand them better: what makes them tick to get you that conversion you want. Below are some elements you need to consider if you ever want to use PPC as a form of market research.
 

What Type of Research?

The first question you need to ask yourself is what type of research you want to use? In general, there are three main types of research:

• Secondary research 
• Primary research which can be split into qualitative and quantitative research.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is the first thing you should look to. This type of research involves you finding out all the information you can possibly find that people have gathered already (basically, looking at other people’s research on a topic similar to yours). The plus to this research is that it is not going to cost you a dime since you can find research similar to yours anywhere such as in books, on the internet or by talking to someone who has conducted the research. However, the problem with secondary research is that it is not tailored to your situation. It merely provides a good overview and is a good way to start things off.
 
Now we come onto the two forms of primary research. Primary research is research that you conduct yourself. You are gathering data directly from your target market.
 
 

Qualitative

Qualitative research is centred around opinions. You want to ask your target market questions that will not just evoke a yes/no reply but will give you a bit more information. For example, a qualitative question on cars would be:

What are your main worries when it comes to driving your car?

This question encourages the person to expand on topics such as car safety, CO2 emissions and so on. There is no right or wrong answer with qualitative research – just your target market’s opinion.
 
This research is good but, for PPC, it will be asking a lot for web users to give you indepth answers to your questions for free. Therefore, offer them an incentive if your landing page is a survey.
 
 

Quantitative

Quantitative research is an ideal form of research to use in PPC. It is all about yes/no answers and statistics. For example, this means you can get your PPC traffic to answer questions with just the click of a button. If it is that easy to answer a question, the web user is more likely to do it than with qualitative.
Quantitative research is best used to come to a decision. Therefore, if you are in the development stage of your product life cycle and there are a few things you are unsure about with your product, ask your target market what they think with quantitative research through PPC and you will sure enough find the solution to your problem/s.