online+research

=Online Research=

What is online research?
There are different types of Online Research. The main ones I will be talking about here is the type of research where companies or organizations conduct surveys online, or monitor customer activity on a site, and Online Research as we use it to find information on the internet for school work. Online research is the administering of a research survey via the internet or in email form. The majority of the research is conducted through surveys that are directed via email. This research is voluntary and does not need to be replied too. Other types include having a survey pop up when a site is loading and asking the customer to either answer a few questions or to give permission to allow the site to monitor where the customer goes on the site, and that is looked at and maybe bought. This is often called Online Marketing Research. Online marketing research is the process by which companies use the Internet to gather data to evaluate how well a product or service is selling to consumers. The information provided by a careful market analysis conducted online can also identify popular trends that can assist a company in creating a strategy that will get better results. When used properly, online marketing research can be an effective tool that a company can use to experience higher revenues. Online research is also conducted through sites like Wikipedia, Google and Yahoo, in the way school students use to compound enough information to write a good paper.

Online Marketing Research
Online market research can help a company learn more about its target consumers, as well as identifying potential areas for growth for the company. The information gathered can provide information about customers who, for example, purchase a shirt and then purchase an accessory to go with it, or return to purchase an accessory. This behavior can be monitored and expanded on by the companies to adapt the consumer/producer balance.

Some companies prefer to remain anonymous when conducting market research, so they hire an outside company to manage this. When hiring an outside company the research is generally more objective than if the company does this research themselves because companies generally have one product or service they wish to promote over others and this may slant the results to reveal that this product is the most successful, even if it is not actually. Often there are programs companies use to conduct the research to both remain anonymous and objective. An online marketing research program can include any number of methodologies. Some possible methods are the direct method, by which a survey is sent out to existing customers to determine satisfaction levels and gather feedback, a demographic survey, where companies contact consumers and gather information from a specific demographic, such as an age group, or a specific geographic region, or even the “blind” method, by which a random sample of the population is contacted for opinions online without having to be registered users on the site.

An issue involved with online marketing research is that companies often work with social networking sites, which sell information about users to these companies. The users are generally not informed or asked if this is okay with them. The information gathered online in social media networks can be very valuable to marketing firms. It is also not necessarily accurate because the behavior monitored is only for one occurrence, and there are occasionally false predictions made. However these have little or no influence on the actual predictions the companies get, because they rarely if ever have only one batch of results from online marketing research, so anomalies generally have no actual effect on the results of the research.

**Online Research**
Online Research to gather information to write an essay or simply to find out something is generally very easy to do. However it is not necessarily guaranteed that the information found is accurate or reliable. The technology involved is the internet, naturally, and whatever program was used to create the web page. Some programs are Web 3 or Dreamweaver. Creating a web page is simple enough for anyone to do, but the information contained may also come from anyone. Many web pages that are used are user edited, like Wikipedia, and this compromises the validity of the information there. If anyone can post information on the Web site, then it may be partially true, but not totally. Finding valid information is possible though, when checking from where the information cones from. University web pages often have accurate information on them, but they generally need an account to access the information. This is true for many sites. If you need to log in, the information is generally more accurate. This is why Libraries are good places to do Online Research, because Libraries generally have subscriptions to databases where there are sites with good information listed.

by Sophie Klasan