Businesses have a ton of different data types, and for most, the challenge is knowing how to manage and store this data to make the best possible decisions. These are the three most important types of data found in most organisations.

1. Quantitative Data

This is the data expressed in numerical values, such as units of time, sales volumes, and hard numbers. It tells businesses about how much of something, how many of something or how often – for example – things occurred.

This could be how many people were in work, how much stock was lost, how many prospects converted and so forth. It’s a great form of data for ready insight, but not usable when you need to measure subjective things such as customer opinions
2. Qualitative Data

This is the ‘soft’ data that provides insight into subjective topics. For example, qualitative data might be used to find out which advertising campaign a customer group found more enticing.

This type of data is usually gathered via methods such as focus groups, interviews, surveys, observations, and questionnaires. A data analysis company such as https://shepper.com/ may work with this type of data, as well as others. Often, a marketing agency will focus on qualitative data while a data analysis company will focus on quantitative methods.

3. Nominal Data

This is the type of data that requires labelling or naming a variable. For example, you could use it to group customers by demographic data such as age group or earnings, or by characteristics such as hair colour, eye colour and preferences of a certain product. This data might be used in combination with the other data types to create a full picture of a given business situation.

Data in businesses is critical to driving success in a fast-paced, competitive environment. The challenge for businesses is to find the right data, manage it and use it to extract meaningful insights for better decision-making – no small task for companies that tend to be drowning in different data types and systems! A good data analysis company can help.