Internal data

Internal data is secondary market research that comes from inside the enterprise — information the business has already gathered itself. It includes its own customer data (order records, account details), sales data (what sold, when and for how much), marketing information (how past promotions performed) and financial information (costs, revenue and profit). Secondary research can be internal, from inside the enterprise, or external, from outside it, such as government statistics.

Data is secondary research only when it was gathered earlier for a different reason and is now being reused for the current research aim. A cinema called The Screenhouse wants to decide when to run its family film club, so it checks its ticket-booking records from last year and finds that Saturday morning bookings were almost twice as high as Wednesday afternoon bookings. Those bookings were recorded to sell tickets, not to plan the club, so reusing them now is secondary research — even though the cinema gathered the data itself.

Why internal data is valuable

• It is quick and free to access: the records already sit in the business's own systems, so nobody has to be paid, surveyed or waited for.
• It is highly relevant, because it describes this enterprise's own customers, prices and products rather than a whole market.
• Trends can be identified over time to help decision making and forecasting. If a leisure centre's attendance records show swimming lessons are busiest every January, it can schedule more instructors before the new year instead of guessing.

Drawbacks of internal data

• It may be out of date or erroneous, such as a file from three years ago or a mistyped price, which gives a false picture to plan from.
• It may not help when launching a new product into a new market, because the business holds no records of those customers yet.
• It may limit ideas and outlook, since it only shows what the business already knows and cannot reveal what a rival is planning.