Statista: Best Business-Data-Platform based on the reach and range of data offered

• Analysis of 12 business-data-platforms shows large differences in the reach and range of data offered

• Platforms differ significantly in the criteria website traffic, number of countries covered and website scope      

• Statista offers the most comprehensive offer in all areas examined

Good company decisions require high-quality and up-to-date data.

Every company, whether it is a start-up or a billion-dollar enterprise, rely on a large amount of information, statistics and data: Sales figures from competitors, market insights, consumer trends and the economic environment, to name a few. The relevance of market data is growing and so is the importance of access to reliable and valid information. This increasingly raises the following question for companies: Which provider of business data should I choose, and which one has the most comprehensive offer? LSP Digital has therefore analyzed this question in more detail and examined the largest global business-data-platforms (Statista was founded 10 years ago by employees from LSP). The aim of this evaluation is to determine the best business data platform on the market. Only companies with a primary focus on providing business, consumer or other economically relevant data were included in the analysis. Companies with a focus on (primary) market research, management consulting or pure financial databases are not included in the evaluation. The evaluation includes the following 12 companies: eMarketer, Euromonitor, Global Data, Global Web Index, IBIS World, IDC, Marketline, Mintel, Oxford Economics, ReportLinker, Statista and Wood Mackenzie.  

The ranking of the companies is based on four selected criteria, for which the information was collected through comprehensive secondary research. The emphasis of the evaluation is on the range of the offered data as well as the reach and user acceptance of the platform. The following four indicators were selected for this purpose: Website Scope (number of indexed pages of the website), Country Scope (number of countries for which statistics are available) and the two traffic factors Total Visits and Unique Visits. These variables were chosen as criteria because they reflect the user acceptance of the platforms listed. At the same time, they are an indirect indicator of the reliability of the business data, as users would only regularly use platforms they trust and have had good experience with. The website scope and the country scope are indicators of the range of the statistics and the amount of data available.

Other qualitative factors were not evaluated due to the lack of comparability across the platforms. Sales figures were not taken into account, because they often display the entire product portfolio and the evaluation only takes the core business (business data platform) into consideration. Included in the study was average monthly traffic data from January to April 2019, current number of countries covered, and the number of indexed webpages.

The results of the quantitative evaluation show a clear variance of the platforms in all the criteria examined. The number of indexed webpages ranged from 2,120 for Global Web Index to 777,000 for Statista. The gap between the top-ranked and second in the number of indexed webpages is particularly large, with eMarketer in second with 92,600 and ReportLinker in third with 80,100. The number of countries in the data profile also varied a lot, from 6 (Mintel) to 215 (both Statista and Marketline). The differences between the data providers are less apparent. In second and third places are Euromonitor (210) and Global Data (200). The indicator Total Visits (average per month, January-April 2019), on the other hand, shows a wide range from 64,362 (Oxford Economics) to 13,060,000 (Statista). Second and third places were Euromonitor (727,180) and Mintel (709,579). A similar result can be seen in the number of unique visits. Oxford Economics has the least amount of unique visits with 25,382 and Statista the highest with 8,340,000. Overall, Statista leads in all four criteria. LSP Digital’s quantitative evaluation of twelve relevant business-data-platforms based on the four criteria paints a clear picture: Globally, Statista is the best business-data-platform based on the reach and range of the data offered.