Your own internal data is often the most relevant data you can get. Government and nonprofit sources offer valuable data free. Use these sources whenever you can! When those sources don’t meet your needs, you’ll have to turn to commercial data suppliers. But which suppliers?
Acxiom
Acxiom is a major source for consumer marketing data. Acxiom’s data sources include publicly available property transaction records, auto warranty and service records, consumer-reported product registrations, surveys, census neighborhood statistics, and retailers. It provides
Demographics, such as age and gender
Home information, such as whether the consumer owns or rents
Motor vehicle information, such as make, model, and insurance renewal
Economic data, including income range and credit card use
Purchase data, types of products purchased, and frequency
Interests and indicators of interest, such as sports, arts and crafts, pet ownership, and other such categories
Corelogic
Corelogic is a source for property and financial information. Its offerings are aimed primarily at lenders, insurers, and landlords.
Datalogix
Datalogix provides sales data for consumer packaged goods (CPG), a category that covers thousands of consumable products in categories such as
Food and beverages
Clothing and shoes
Tobacco
Cleaning products
Pet care items
Cosmetics
This type of data is used primarily by marketers promoting CPG brands.
DataSift
DataSift provides social media activity data. If you’d like to know how often a topic is being mentioned in social media, who’s talking, and what they’re saying, you can get this data through DataSift.
DataSift offers data from more than 20 sources, ranging from the well-known Twitter, Facebook public posts, YouTube, and Bitly to rising voices Sina Weibo, Intense Debate, and Yammer. It is one of only two sources for complete Twitter data.
eBureau
eBureau is primarily a provider of scoring services for
Fraud detection
Credit risk
Collections
Consumer lead quality evaluation
Equifax
Equifax is one of the three major credit-reporting agencies. It provides information about consumer credit activity and credit scores. It also provides consumer demographics, credit information about businesses, supplier information, and platforms for the management of collections and other business activities.
Experian
Experian is best known as one of the three major credit-reporting agencies. It provides consumer and business credit data and credit scoring. Experian also offers many types of consumer data, including
Brand preference and psychographic measures for many population segments, including kids and teens; lesbians, gays, bigenders, and transgenders; and Hispanic groups
Media behavior, brand preference, and attitudes by location down to the zip code level
Consumer online, mobile, and other media behavior
Gnip
Gnip provides social media data. It supplies posts and other data from many social media sources, and offers the same advantages over collecting this data through the social media site APIs.
ID Analytics
ID Analytics focuses on identity fraud risk, providing an identity score to help businesses assess the risk of identity fraud in business transactions. These scores are calculated based on a combination of personally identifiable information (such as date of birth, phone number, and social security number) and device history (computer, smartphone, and so on) to assess the risk of identity fraud.
Intelius
Intelius focuses on information about people and identity, including
Verification, such as reverse phone verification and email lookup
Information, such as people search and social net search
Protection, such as cell phone caller ID and criminal check
Marriage, divorce, and death records
Business services, such as employment and tenant screening
IRI
IRI provides data on consumer shopping and attitudes, with information of considerable depth for CPG marketers, including unique survey data not available elsewhere. Offerings include
Consumer panel data for information about consumer shopping and buying habits, attitudes, and demographics
Online health and wellness surveys that provide data to support brand marketing
Point-of-sale data for more than 12,500 retail stores
Nielsen
Nielsen is most famous as the company that creates television ratings. Nielsen tracks television viewing, it’s true, but it also tracks audience data for a number of other media platforms, including online, mobile, radio, and social media.
This is not survey data; Nielsen directly measures actual audience behavior. The data is typically used by advertisers to plan their media purchases. Nielsen also provides data about consumer buying behavior, obtained through point-of-sale records in stores and online, and data about shopping behavior and attitudes obtained from panel data from over 250,000 households across 25 countries.
PeekYou
Data miners who want to use information about individuals from online sources often find it challenging to match data sources together. Many names are not unique, and many people use more than one name online.
PeekYou provides information about web links and how they relate to people. PeekYou uses data from social media, news sites, and other sources, along with its own technology, to create a score to assess the likelihood that individual web pages are associated with particular people — people who may be the creators or the subjects of the page.
If you have URLs and want to know who made them, or who the information is about, this is the source to investigate.
Rapleaf
Rapleaf provides information about individuals based on their email addresses. Rapleaf provides several types of information, including
Demographics, such as age, gender, and zip code
Interests, such as health and wellness, arts and crafts, and business
Purchase behavior for many categories, including charitable donations
Recorded Future
Recorded Future provides real-time threat intelligence information. It collects information from nearly half a million online sources in seven languages. The scope of this data covers a wide variety of threats as diverse as malware attacks, geopolitical instability, and events that pose a threat to corporations or executives.
TransUnion
TransUnion is one of the three primary credit-reporting agencies. It provides credit information about both consumers and businesses. TransUnion’s offerings also include criminal records, bankruptcies, demographics, and other data useful for risk management and fraud prevention in a number of industries, including insurance, financial services, and healthcare.
