If you run a small business, especially with a loyal set of regular customers, you know that it pays to understand what they like about your service or product and why they use you and not your rivals. Unfortunately it takes time and money to get this kind of information, which is something most small biz owners don’t have.

The Google Surveys service offers a new alternative to the traditional cost heavy marketing agency approach to conducting user surveys. To use it, all you have to do is log on and click the Create Survey button, after which you’ll be taken through an easy to use wizard to set up your own custom survey.

There are a bunch of templates available covering purchasing behavior (why do you buy x?) to advertising response and you can select either a finely targeted audience (ie, users of your product) or a generic internet audience which is the cheapest option. The service covers the US, UK and Canada only at the moment.

Once you’ve chosen the audience, you get to set the questions you want to ask and that’s it. Press a button and you’re survey will be submitted to the target audience. Prices range from 10c per response for the generic distribution to 50c a response for a custom or tightly tailored demographic survey.

This is very much a practical and zero frills service, if you need something more exotic and/or sophisticated – and you’re willing to pay for it – then you’ll need Survey Monkey or one of the other commercial alternatives.