Should you do your market research in Google?

Market research and intelligence are quickly growing businesses. Every successful business is making its decisions based on data. Decisions based on gut feelings are always risky.   

With Google you can find plenty of data – but how do you know which one to trust? 

You can find hundreds of thousands of data sources when you go to Google. But how do you know whether you can trust the data at your disposal?  

It isn’t easy to evaluate when you can trust the data you have found. When we make decisions, we often must form an idea of confidence level in which we are satisfied. Whatever your data quality is, you need to decide how big the possibility of error you are ready to accept.   

For example, the product manager makes decisions on the user interface development based on user research. There is a matter of how (method) they have done the research (surveys, interviews, etc.), how many users (sample size) were involved, and where the users participating presenting presented the correct user profile. Of course, you can get more reliable data when you increase sample size and combine different methods, but there is also a limit on how much time and money you can invest in gathering your data.  

Gathering market intelligence is time consuming – if you want to do it well 

In general, in any research, it is essential that whoever does it is also doing their homework to ensure the results present a larger population with high confidence. 

When it comes to market intelligence and research, very few companies can run those with their internal resources. However, if you have your market research unit or use research partners frequently, your annual investments in market intelligence are a significant investment in your organization. In addition, your organization is probably constantly looking for new market opportunities in terms of new markets for existing products (business development, sales & marketing) or expanding your product portfolio (product management).  

Conflicting information when doing market research online 

When you want to evaluate your market potential in different markets, you would like to know how large is the market in the region/country. You will seek information online, buy reports and engage research partners. The first challenge is to decide which partners to engage and whose reports are worth buying. For the most popular countries and regions, you will probably find several estimates on the market size. They can be similar or very different from each other. What do these scenarios mean?   

When data from different sources are in the same ballpark  

If several sources indicate the market size in the same ballpark, you can safely assume that the information is probably quite close to reality.   

If data from different sources is not telling the same story   

If the numbers are very different. Let’s say that another source says that your market size would be 200 M€, and another one suggests it could be as high as 500 M€. The difference is so huge that you cannot make any decisions based on it. What can you do in this case? Roll a dice?  

If you have more than two sources, you might exclude outliers. Then you can dig deeper into sources, how reliable they are, what type of methodology they are using. Don’t forget to check if the data reports the same thing with the same parameters. If you are buying market reports one by one, getting additional sources is usually multiplying the cost of research.   

Statzon is refining the data for you  

How does Statzon ensure data quality?   

We are working with over 200 data sources; we have manually vetted each. We also present them in a standard format, so it is easier to compare data from different sources. We are also monitoring feedback from our users to ensure the highest quality of the data.  

At Statzon, we encourage our data partners to provide information on the methodology they have used to build the report or dataset.  

Why is this important? The user of data wants to understand the market, not the research behind it. However, if two pieces of research have slightly different numbers, the user needs to know why they differ.   

In Statzon, differences usually mean that two research companies have selected different methods when building data set. This gives you the possibility to evaluate the data from different perspectives.   

With Statzon, you can trust the data even from research companies you don’t know, as we have vetted them before adding their data.   

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