Google Spreadsheets Update: Blessing in Disguise for Marketers…

Web-based productivity tools have been around for quite a while, but their usage and focus has primarily been limited to a very niche audience. While scanning through the feeds in my ‘RSS Feed Reader’, I discovered an interesting update in Google Spreadsheets. On digging deeper, it appears that the update has solved a big problem for market-researchers and statisticians.

Let’s look at the 2 ‘W’s then. What is the problem and what is the solution being offered by Google Spreadsheets’ latest update.

The Problem

• There are various form builders and online-survey tools out there but the ‘marketers’ face tough time to convince the respondents in filling up those web-based survey-forms. I think it because of two key reasons…
• In a typical scenario, the surveyor sends an email to the ‘prospective participants’ and requests them to
• There’s a substantial proportion of ‘participants’ who ignore the e-mail since it involves opening an external link and navigating to another page for filling out the survey (a big pain)
• There’s a whole process of signing up with the third-party web-survey service and its actually quite tedious
• ‘Conducting Survey’ via web-based forms and then ‘Collecting Data’ via ‘excel’ or any other spreadsheet tools are two separate processes

The Solution

• As a first-step, the surveyor still communicates via e-mail but the entire survey appears in the e-mail itself. It works with web-based as well as desktop mail clients
• While the proportion of ‘participants’ won’t drop to 0, the actual percentage of participants would increase as a lot of people would fill the survey via the e-mail itself
• No signing-up involved, as all you’ve to do is click on the ‘Google Docs’ link on top of your gmail link.
• The process of ‘Conducting Survey’ and ‘Collecting Data’ are merged together. The surveyor simply sends the questionnaire, to his target audience and all the answers appear in an excel sheet.

Once you’re through with that you can use the traditional sorting and other functions to do deeper analysis. A fantastic utility and must add to any marketer’s kitty.