External Data for Consulting Firms: Insights and Use Cases

For business and competitive intelligence, lead generation, people analytics, and more.

External Data for Consultants

Many companies have achieved strong improvements in growth and productivity by collecting and using data from their own internal activities.

Now, external web data – from social media activity, product reviews, employee sentiment, and more –are helping companies unlock further improvements in business outcomes.

Read on to find out how the most innovative consultants are using Thinknum’s web data to help their clients edge out the competition.

Analyze Job Listings: Aerospace

View the number of open job listings at major aerospace companies in real time. Then filter to gain in-depth competitive insights into specific market, location, and job categories.

Track changes in open job categories overtime to gain insights into a company’s corporate strategy and growth.

Or use our Word Cloud tool to visualize popular words in companies’ new job listings.

Job openings at Blue Origin and SpaceX dropped as a results of the COVID-19 pandemic. Recruitment at the two companies has diverged markedly since then, with SpaceX currently looking to fill more open positions than ever.

Track Headcount: Semiconductors

To proxy for employee headcount, use the aggregated number of LinkedIn profiles that list a company as their employer. Compare competitors’ headcount, or track corporate expansion and layoffs, all in real time.

Month-over-month change in headcount for competitors in the semiconductor industry.

Visualize Store Locations: F&B

Our Store Locations dataset allows users to compare bricks-and-mortar locations across companies in a user-friendly map - a powerful tool for lead generation, competitive intelligence, and more. As the food delivery wars heat up across Europe, for example, map the restaurants that partner with each player to understand where competitors are fighting for market dominance.

Restaurant locations for top competitors in the food delivery industry.

Compare Employee Sentiment: EV Companies

Research suggests that happy workers are good for profits. But gauging employee satisfaction levels can be tricky. Our employee sentiment datasets track millions of anonymous employee reviews. Use NLP to find out how employees rate their management and CEO, career opportunities, compensation, and more. You can filter by attributes like location, position, and industry. Or see how employee sentiment for a given company changes over time, and rank competitors based on quantitative ratings.

Rivian and Lucid Motors employees rate their companies’ business outlook, with a clear divergence starting

Track User Activity: Video Games

Thinknum’s Traction dataset is comprised of publicly available metrics harnessed from corporate websites. It tracks user activity for Ubisoft and Gameloft by indexing the number of concurrent users, giving consultants a real-time view of who’s winning in the video game industry.

Change in the number of concurrent users at Ubisoft and Vivendi’s community forums.

Compare Rental Prices: Real Estate

Access historical data on listed property rentals to compare prices over time across geographies. Filter by location, size, and number of bedrooms or bathrooms for insights on specific market segments.

The average price of rental properties listed on American Homes 4 Rent shows significant geographic

Analyze Car Inventory by Model: Auto Industry

Our car inventory dataset tracks the daily inventories of all major online dealerships through each vehicle’s unique VIN identification number. Users can filter by brand, year, car model, location and other attributes to predict car sales in real time.

Used luxury vehicle prices listed on Carvana.

Compare Traction: Crypto Trading Platforms

Our Traction dataset tracks the number of active forum users on different cryptocurrency trading platforms. This is a real-time indicator of how different platforms change in popularity over time.

Active forum users have grown significantly across different crypto trading platforms, but NyChyper and Ava Labs have pulled away from their peers.

Map Tenants: Commercial REITs

Thinknum tracks the tenant directory of hundreds of REITs on a daily basis. Users can identify the total number of tenants for a REIT over time, or a REIT’s exposure to specific tenants. Drill down to find the square footage of each individual tenant for a given REIT, or analyze aggregate vacancy rates across an entire REIT daily.

Track the square footage of all tenants for commercial REITs Rexford & First Industrial Realty.

Track Web Traffic: Drone Delivery

Analyze real-time and historical web traffic data for insights into a company’s digital strategy. Compare page views, unique visitors, or website rankings across competitors, to understand who is winning the war for users’ attention.

Changes in web traffic, measured as page views per million users, for competitors in the drone delivery space.