Knowledge Base

There are many ways to try to understand consumers or your target market. One of them is to explore consumer spending data that covers how much money consumers spend on average on various goods and services. Another is to see how much time users spend doing certain tasks.

United States

In the US, there are two large data collection programs that aim to find out how American's spend their time and money.

• Consumer Expenditure Survey. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, detailed data on how American's are spending their money. See the book Best Customers: Demographics of Consumer Demand for insight into how this data can be interpreted.
  • You can also use SimplyAnalytics to view the Consumer Expenditure Survey. When selecting your data, change from the Category view to the Folder view, and select Consumer Expenditure Estimates. 
• American Time Use Survey. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, a variety of data and reports on how much time American's spend doing certain tasks.
• Social Explorer. Go to Tables > Market Profile Data and select the current year. Select geographies and then chose data variables, including consumer spending by broad category.

Global

• Passport. Passport contains a variety of market size and share data on consumer products that is used to create reports on consumer trends. Search Tip: In the top navigation bar, go to Consumers > Income & Expenditure. Scroll down to search for statistics or get country reports.
• OECD Time Use Data. High level data about how people spend their time in countries around the world. More detailed data for individual countries may be available elsewhere.

See also Public Opinion Poll Sources.