Our supplier, Market Location recently made some changes to their business databases which has created some challenges for us and our clients. We wanted to explain the recent drop in the number of businesses in the last Vision update.
Market Location are a leading B2B data solutions provider. It’s widely recognised that their database is one of the most up to date and accurate in the UK. The entire database is telephone verified ensuring the best quality possible when using their data.
What's the difference and why?
- 2.1 million businesses (November 2021)
- 1.6 million businesses (August 2022)
That’s a significant reduction of around 500,000 businesses. We got in touch with Market Location to try and find out why there has been such a decrease. They told us that in the latest count they provided to us, they did not include the “Non-Classified” and “Gone-Away” records.
Non-Classified (300,000) are any records that did not have telephone numbers. These are typically Companies House records which they were unable to call and verify.
Gone-Away (200,000) records were deemed as records that they weren’t sure were still trading post-Covid and chose to remove them.
Basically, they are striving to have an accurate database that to their knowledge are actively trading and have been verified.
Are there any other options?
Given the size of the difference between updates and the challenges it has created, we’ve started to explore some other options.
Firstly, we’ve gone back to Market Location and asked if they could provide another version of the count, but to include the “Non-Classified” records again. That way we can offer our clients the choice of which version of the count they use.
We’ve also downloaded the data from Companies House and have carried out some initial processing to remove as many low quality records as possible. We’ll continue to work on this with the aim to offer it as an alternative option for our clients to use. It won’t have any verification and may contain records that are inaccurate or out of date, but it will be up to you what option you feel is right for your business.
If you want to find out a bit more about Business Data, then please check out one of our other articles.
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