We have realised that simply using Google Adwords can save us a fortune in marketing research. With a few caveats that I'll come to later, here's why:
The impressions column in Google Adwords reports, gives you a relative index of which of your products are of most interest to punters.
Example 1:
We have a service aimed at fans of the Premiership football teams (that's soccer to most of you guys). Since we began running a Google ad related to every premiership team, we were amazed at the obvious difference in popularity of the teams .... and it seems to have little to do with the size or success of the club. One of the best known clubs in the world was getting less than a tenth of the impressions of a fairly minor club. OK here are some of the caveats on this one - you've got to make sure that it's a level playing field (groan - sorry guys). ie you are using similar search terms for each club. And you need to be aware that all you have discovered is that at the present time there is more interest in club A rather than club B on-line. But hey it's pointed us to really making sure that all our other promotional efforts are directed towards the clubs with the biggest potential customer base (for us).

Example 2:
We market a range of management training programmes - everything from accounting to marketing, and we do so in 4 different countries. The adwords reports tell us which programmes people are looking for - relatively speaking - and show us differences between countries (because we are using Geo-targeting). Caveats here are that unlike the soccer teams, we may be screwing up on the search terms, and missing some really obvious ones that (say) accountants might be seraching for.

I'm not saying that this kind of research is perfect, but imagine what it would cost us to do commissioned research across 4 countries .... and already analysis of 6 months Google adwords results has affected our strategic directions.

Mike Sands
No connection to Google except as frequent whinger to their helpdesk