10 Free Market Research Tools You Should be Using

Market research is crucial because you can’t supply the best products or services to your customers without knowing what they need. As a business person, you should always try to solve your customers’ problems through your business’s products and services. Many of you have often invested countless hours tediously researching the market to no avail. Well, nowadays, there are various useful market research tools in the market.

But finding the best instrument from the abundance of online tools will possibly also result in a waste of your precious time. So, to save you time and money, today, we have listed the ten best free-market tools that are easy to use.

Before moving to the list of tools, let’s see why you should use market research tools for your business research. 

Why are market research tools necessary?

Due to constant changes in the market, knowing what is essential to your audience can help you outsell your competitors and bring new customers to you. The right tool helps you analyze your business’s market and growth. So, let’s see why market research tools are vital. 

• Spotting business opportunities easily
• Lowering your business risks
• Producing relevant materials
• Finding where to advertise
• Outperforming competitors
• Setting a higher goal for your business
• Easily making a decision
• Identifying customer requirements
• Improving selling techniques

Now, let’s move on to the main topic of this article.

10 best market research tools

Here, we have categorized the list of market research tools as follows.

Tools for data visualization

1. Google Trends
2. Independent Analytics
3. Statista
4. Tableau Public
5. Google Analytics
6. Consumer Barometer

Market research tools for keyword research

1. Google keyword planner
2. Ubersuggest

Content research tool

1.  Google Alerts

Social insights research tools

1. Pew Research Center
2. MakeMyPersona

Now, let’s see the detailed information about each tool.

Google Trends

Google Trends is one of the best free-market research tools which lets you look for specific keywords, subjects, and phrases that have been inquired over a particular period of time. The work is done by analyzing a portion of Google searches to calculate how many searches are done for the phrase entered in proportion to the total number of searches done on Google over the concurrent.

Features

• Real-time data 
• Point out the latest trends
• Simple and easy UI
• Easy to navigate

Price

It’s a free tool

Independent Analytics

One of the best ways to observe and understand your market is to analyze the way they interact with your own website. For WordPress websites, one of the best ways to do that is with the Independent Analytics plugin. It can show you which pages on your site are being viewed, where your traffic is coming from, and much more. It’s much simpler to use than other analytics apps, and it doesn’t share your data with external servers, greatly enhancing privacy for you and your visitors.

Features

• Top pages and traffic sources
• Geographic data
• Devices and browsers reports
• Save your own custom reports
• Easily export reports to CSV & PDF

Price

Independent Analytics is complete free to use. You can record an unlimited number of visitors on as many sites as you want. If you’re interested in additional functionality, such as campaign tracking or click tracking, there is a Pro version available with both annual and lifetime packages available, starting at $54/year.

Statista

Statista is one of the best market research tools for building online statistics in market research. It gives access to the data from market research institutions and their opinion. With this tool, you can even get an assessment from business organizations and government institutions in different languages. Researching various industries helps you to understand the nature of competition. Furthermore, using Statista lets you discover the relative size of the industries, their average expenditures, and individual company expenditures.

Features

• Statistics portal
• Research and analysis
• Content and information design
• eCommerce insights for your business

Price

You can use the Basic Account plan of Statista for primary data and statistics for free. The premium plans start at $149/month.

Tableau Public

Tableau Public is a free data visualization tool that lets you figure out market research data with analytics and business intelligence. Using this mechanism, you will get complex data visualization simply and intuitively. Moreover, you can create an interactive and distributed dashboard that trends with colorful charts and tables. It connects to your files to obtain and proceed data into graphs.

Features

• Create interactive graphs and maps
• Build a dashboard in minutes
• Automated mobile layouts
• Automatically connect Tableau Public to Google Sheets
• Embedded visualization
• Highlight the analysis

Price

Tableau Public is free of cost. Prices vary if you switch to Tableau Explorer, Tableau Viewer, or Tableau Creator. 

Google Analytics

Though Google Analytics is not a broader tool for providing market research entirely, it can give feedback on how your customers are behaving when they are on your website. It will show you which of your products have more views and fewer sales or which social media channel is getting more responses from your clients. In a nutshell, Google Analytics helps you analyze your website’s traffic and give you a complete picture of your visitors and their requirements. 

Features

• Reporting traffic
• Tracking conversion
• Keyword guidance
• Reference of third-parties
• Custom dashboard

Price

You can use their free service if you are a small business that wants to avoid paying monthly fees. If you want to use many features, you can buy Google Analytics 360. The price is dependent on hit volume and starts around ~$50k+ USD/year. 

Consumer Barometer

Google developed a free, collective tool called the “Consumer Barometer.” This tool aims to help you understand buyers’ internet usage habits worldwide. There are two different ways to use this service. One is to explore the primary data from the research, which comes up with an infographic format that sums up the key trends and statistics. This will help you to identify the consumers’ internet usage habits. 

The other way is to use the tool as a graph builder. In that way, you can access the full data from the report. Additionally, broken down into country grouping, you will be able to find out how buyers interact online.

Features

• Graph builder
• Digital trended data
• Explore audience stories
• Discover buyers curated insights

Price

Consumer Barometer is a free tool.

Google Keyword Planner

Google Keyword Planner is a fantastic market research tool for basic keyword research. You can free create an account on Google Adwords to use the Google Keyword Planner. The main task of the tool is looking for phrases or keywords that are related to your business. In brief, Google Keyword Planner allows you to find new keywords and get a detailed idea of how your audiences search for information within your market. 

Features

• Research keywords
• Suggestions for daily budget
• Monthly search details
• Column for new competition
• Add new keywords to existing campaigns

Price

Google Keyword Planner is one of the free market research tools. 

Ubersuggest

Ubersuggest is a simple tool for doing market research on keywords and content. You have to input a phrase, and it will come out with a long list of additional keywords. In version 6.0, you can log in to the dashboard of Ubersuggest for free and can trace the ranking of your competitors’ websites. 

Features

• Overview of domain
• Top SEO pages
• Keyword ideas
• Content suggestions
• Backlink data

Price

This tool is also free.

Google Alerts

Google Alerts is one of the best free-market research tools you should use. You can set email alerts to get notified for each new result in Google that matches your needs, such as web pages, blogs, scientific research, or newspaper articles. The tool lets you put the frequency, search terms, and many more to get the best results. Besides, you can take appropriate measures to get potential clients and expand your business. 

Features

• Free notification service
• Real-time alerts on keywords
• Track your competitors
• Create links
• Easy to use

Price

You can use the tool for free.

Pew Research Center

Pew Research Center is a fair fact tank that informs people about the issues, points of view, and trends shaping the world. They conduct demographic research, content analysis, public opinion polling, and other data-controlled social research. The website has a massive database of free inquiries on various fields, such as marketing statistics to social media usage, and political issues to economic situations. So, this is one of the robust market research tools that will help you better understand your target audience and trace the beneficial market trends.

Features

• Smooth user interface
• Interactive charts
• Research center
• Huge database

Price

You can use the tool free through their website.

MakeMyPersona

MakeMyPersona is one of the market research tools from HubSpot. It allows you to create buyer personas by answering a series of questions based on existing market research. Using this tool, you can definitely find out more about your market. Moreover, MakeMyPersona will help you to understand your ideal users and give them a better user experience. 

Features

• Easily create personas
• Fantastic form layouts
• Essential question series to understand users
• Downloadable word document

Price

This tool is free.

Final thoughts

Here, we tried to give some basic ideas on ten free market research tools. Applying one or all of them will significantly help you to know about your online business market. You should take time and look for the best ones from the list. 

Conversely, you can also consider other analytics and feature-rich paid tools, such as Ahrefs, Moz, and SEMRush, for your online business.