BA 205: People, Planet, & Profit

Statista offers statistics and information covering worldwide markets, industries, and societal topics. All statistics and reports can be directly downloaded in PDF and PowerPoint formats. Start with a search for an industry, market, topic, or specific company. 

Once you have entered the main search interface in Statista, there are several options for limiting and expanding your search results with filters. On the left hand side, you can limit your results to different types of sources: statistics, forecasts, market analytics, studies, Statista dossiers and reports, topics, and infographics. 

More filters include: publication date, category, region, and archive. 

Statista includes global reports and statistics. If you are only interested in markets and demographics in the United States, select "North America" as the region to retrieve information from the U.S. 

If you are looking for the most recent information, you can also select the "Advanced Search" option at the top and change the default order of results to sort by "Date of publication," which will show the most recent reports first. 

The Statista search bar also includes predictive searching, and will display additional keywords that may be similar to your search. 

Notice the other suggestions at the top. 

"Single term" means that Statista uses quotation marks to designate a phrase as a single term. This means the search engine will retrieve results that include that exact string of words first, rather than only one word or the other. Example: "social media" 

*Wildcard means that Statista uses an asterisk (*) with part of a word to retrieve all keywords with that prefix or suffix. Example: "mark*" will retrieve results that include mark, market, marketing, and so on. 

Business Insights also includes industry, company information, case studies, and SWOT analyses. 

If you know the specific company you are looking for, you can use the top search bar and select "company" from the drop down menu to retrieve the report. Not all companies will be included in this database. 

Note: When searching for companies, you may need to be extremely exact with how you spell a company's official name. Wal-mart is a great example. You may be searching "Walmart" and find few results. The copyrighted spelling of the company we know is "Wal-mart Stores Inc." If you don't know the exact spelling of a company's name, you can usually find it through the Wikipedia widget on Google search results. 

Use the Company Finder search to companies within a particular country, state, industry, or revenue bracket. Use the filters on the left hand side to build a search. This example shows business in the United States, Kentucky, and Louisville. You could further filter these results by selecting and industry and its size by revenue and employees. 

For an industry search, you can search by industry name of NAICS code. The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is a controlled list of all industries in the region that is updated yearly. If you don't know an industry's NAICS code, you can search for it on the U.S. Census Bureau Business & Industry site. 

Business Insights also features a tool for comparing countries, companies, and industries by yearly revenue. Below is an example comparison chart of Target Corp. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. 

Note: When searching for companies, you may need to be extremely exact with how you spell a company's official name. Wal-mart is a great example. You may be searching "Walmart" and find few results. The copyrighted spelling of the company we know is "Wal-mart Stores Inc." If you don't know the exact spelling of a company's name, you can usually find it through the Wikipedia widget on Google search results. 

Business Insights is also a great place for find Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) Reports. These reports are usually published by third-party analyst companies and are a good source of critical information on the current state of the company and its forecast.