Business data glossary: the terms behind our figures
Auspector ·
Every figure we publish rests on a handful of defined terms. This glossary gathers them — record, arrival date, window, fill rate, complete record, website information versus own website, duplicate phones, credits, export — each defined the same way our method page defines it, so a number you quote carries its meaning with it.
A number without definitions cannot be checked, so the definitions travel with the numbers. Each entry below says what a term means when we use it — and, where it matters, what it does not mean. The same definitions, page-formatted, are on our method page.
- Arrival date
- The date a new record entered our newly opened businesses section — the day it reached us. It is not the opening date and not the registration date, and every “new” figure is dated by it.
- Category
- The trade a record carries as its own — “pizza restaurant”, “nail salon”, “roofing contractor”. Categories are not merged into industries, which is what makes narrow lists possible. A sector, on our data pages, is a group of such categories.
- Complete record
- A record on which address, phone, category and district are all present. Website is deliberately not part of this definition, because its meaning shifts with what counts as a website.
- Coordinates
- The position of the record, present on effectively every record. This is what turns a list into a route for a field team.
- Credit
- The unit that pays for opening a record’s details. Search and counting are unlimited on every plan; a credit is used only when you open a record for the first time, and one credit opens one newly opened business or five established ones. A record already opened never costs a credit again.
- District
- The sub-city part of the address, and the fourth field of a complete record. It lets a field team work neighbourhood by neighbourhood.
- Duplicate phone numbers
- The same number appearing on several records — a chain listing one head-office number on many branches, or an operator working many service areas. Counts of records are honest; for call volume, ask for unique numbers.
- Export
- Downloading your results as CSV or XLSX. An export counts as an open, so it spends credits the same way — and each row carries a stable per-record identifier, so a re-import updates rows instead of duplicating them.
- Fill rate
- The share of records in which a given field is filled, calculated one field at a time — phone fill rate, website fill rate, never a single average. It says a value is present, not that it is correct.
- Freshness
- Two clocks: the feed re-scans every day and a business we find becomes searchable and exportable within a day; the rest of the database carries each record’s details as of the day it was collected, with newly opened businesses added on top.
- New record
- A record that carries a sign of having opened recently and has entered our newly opened businesses section. Its date is the arrival date; “new” never means “opened today”.
- Own website
- A web address on the record that is the business’s own domain — nothing else. Runs lower than website information, and the two are never mixed under one label.
- Per 1,000 records
- The rate our sector pages use: new records in the window, divided by all records in the sector, times a thousand. One count and one division — no sample in it anywhere.
- Phone on record
- A phone number is present on the record. We do not dial it and do not claim it is answered — presence is a fill statement, not a quality statement.
- Reachable by phone, no website
- Records with a phone number and no website information on them — the working list for web agencies and telecom sellers. An empty website field is not proof the business has no site; it is a good opening question.
- Record
- One establishment with a name and a location in our database. A chain with forty branches is forty records, not one, and a business can hold several records over time. Every count we publish counts records, never “number of businesses”.
- Region
- The territory a record sits in — a state, a province, a county, a region of the country. Some new records carry no region yet, so regional counts are floors, and regions are compared only with regions of the same country.
- Saved search and watch
- A search you have saved; on watch, new matches arrive by email every day. This is what turns a one-off list into a pipeline.
- Search
- Filtering the database — country, city, category, arrival window, phone and website presence. Unlimited and free on every plan; you pay only when you open records.
- Website information
- An own website or a booking, appointment, ordering or other platform page on the record. A social media profile alone does not count: a record whose only web address is a social profile is on the “no website” side.
- Window
- The 30-day period the newly opened section holds. New records are added every day; records older than 30 days leave the section. Every windowed figure states its two dates.