How much money is required to validate target market with Google Adwords?

You need a clearly defined goal. E.g. you might want to see how the audience responds to two different videos you have for watching on two landing pages? This could tell you about the perception of your offer and content. You want to know which video is more popular. You launch some ads and bring them to the landing page. You setup goals for when the video is watched and track it in Google Analytics. You set a defined testing period and a defined spend. At the ideal I'd want 200 conversions for each demographic to get some statistical significance of which one is higher. If your conversion rate was 20%, this would be 1000 clicks needed. At $2 per click, this would cost you $2000 per demographic, or $10,000 for all your demographics. However, depending on how you design your test, you can get a conclusion with lesser clicks and a lower cost. It all comes down to how you design an experiment. To answer your question about measurement, I find Google Analytics is good for most things. Obviously ensuring that proper linking between Adwords and Analytics is done, and you're able to identify the source of traffic.

I've found Google Consumer Surveys to be more effective than Google Ad Words when it comes to testing multiple business hypotheses on a shoestring budget, especially if you're in the "internet consumer" type of business. I would first use Consumer Surveys to narrow down my hypotheses, and then build landing page and spend on Adwords to further validate high-potential hypotheses. For Google Consumer Surveys, you can reach your target market by using a "screening question" e.g. "Have you taken an online course in the past year?"and then Google will follow-up by surveying only the people who respond to "yes" on this. As a bonus, you'll only be charged $0.50 for every response to the follow-up question. This is useful if you're reaching a particular niche, for example those who indicate that they "spend more than $100 on online courses a year" in a multiple-choice screening question.The results are broken down into nice demographics so you can check if you see distinct patterns.  If you don't need that screening question, each response costs some $0.10. Personally, I find Google Adwords slightly more complex because you're sometimes not sure if you're verifying whether there is market demand for your product, or if you're really verifying the effectiveness of your copy on the ads, your keyword choices or the design and flow of your landing page. p.s. You can try to search for coupons for Google Consumer Surveys. I believe there are a couple of '$25 for $100 in credit' floating around. ;)

Wow that is a vast question. Not sure I can't answer it all but here's a few hints. Knowing how much you have to spend depends greatly on competition on your keywords. First of all, you MUST set up conversion tracking. This is mandatory for the rest of the process. Second, before releasing any vast cash flow, you have to test your campaign against false positive. This is easy, from your keyword list, choose the option that shows what people did really enter in the search field. This is really important because you don't wan't to pay for people searching something totally different from your products. For example at Sellsy, when advertising for our invoicing services, there's no way we can bid on the "invoice" keyword in broad search. This would simply mean that a request like "ATT invoice" would lead to us. Bad, very bad. Once you have a clear view that your campaign is ready for market, then you can think about how to spend to run your tests. Just another thing to know before that. Adwords have two bidding mode: the CPC (buy clicks) and the CPA (buy leads). Those are VERY different in terms of results. CPC can make you spell a lot of money very quickly, meaning a lot of clicks, but without any concern on the quality. CPA is very different: you don't meet your daily budget, numbers are quite lower, but the quality is better. What I mean is that those two ways are really different, so you should try both. (note: you have to have at least 15 conversions in the last month to activate CPA). To sum it up, for a business in a not-too-competitive environment, for one campaign on one target: - first test, keywords and campaign fine tuning: 1 month / $50 /day - campaign OK trying CPC: 1 month / $200/day - now trying CPA: 1 month / $200/day So we're around $15K for a well done test campaign (again, on one topic only). There're also a lot of different things to look at: the networks, the banners ads, the videos, mobile ads... Well, it's hard to give a straight answer given the variety of options, but I hope these classic steps will help you handle the problem.

The more you can afford to invest, the more you will learn. However, testing 5 creatives on 5 audiences with 5 landing pages sounds like an expensive proposition. I would suggest honing your list down to 1 audience, 2 landing pages (A/B split test) and 2 ads. Otherwise, it could take many thousands of dollars to make a reasonably significant conclusion. Keep in mind that you are testing your offer. If the offer turns out to be something folks want, you'll get data with any landing page or ad creative. So, be prepared to tweak your offer, too. You can use Google Analytics if you've connected it with AdWords, but most of all you need to measure success is inside AdWords. Set your ads to rotate evenly, and your split test will work great. Also be sure you're tracking conversions before you start.

Depending on the reach of your product/service you will need at least several thousand dollars. If you have a niche service it might take you more timeî.  Try getting a good Click Through Rate for the Ad and keep all landing pages the same.  Remember to follow actual conversions not just clicks.