19 Key Market Research Statistics

Market research is a growing multi-billion-dollar industry.

Brands leverage market research insights to introduce customer-focused offerings and improve their experiences.

From mobile-first surveys to social media analytics, researchers have access to a growing toolkit helping companies make data-driven business decisions.

Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll find on this page:

Market Research Industry Statistics
Market Research Methods Statistics
AI in Market Research Statistics

Market Research Statistics (Highlights)

The global market research industry is forecasted to bring in $140 billion in revenue in 2024.
Online/mobile quantitative research services accounted for 35% of worldwide revenues of market research companies.
Around 47% of researchers worldwide state that they use AI regularly in their market research activities.
Online surveys rank as the most used quantitative method among market research professionals with 85% of respondents who say they use this method regularly.
Online in-depth interviews with webcams rank as the most used qualitative research method, with over one-third (34%) of researchers using it regularly.

1. Market Research Industry Statistics

This section presents key statistics to show market research industry revenues, leading players in the industry and revenue breakdown by market research services.

Global market research industry forecasted to generate $140 billion in revenue in 2024 (up from $130 billion in 2023) – ESOMAR

Between 2021 and 2024, the market research industry grew by 37.25% from $102 billion to $140 billion – ESOMAR
When ranked by market research turnover, the US market leads the ranking with $48 billion, followed by the UK ($9.1 billion) and China ($2.88 billion) – ESOMAR

Gartner holds the top position as the highest-earning company in the market research field with $5.48 billion in research revenue in 2022, followed by IQVIA ($5.43 billion) and Salesforce ($4.52 billion) – Statista

Online/mobile quantitative research services contributed 35% to the worldwide revenue of market research companies in 2022. Other major revenue contributors include reporting (20.2%), online traffic/web analytics (9.7%), online/mobile qualitative research (6%) – Statista

2. Market Research Methods Statistics

There’s a growing number of market research methods from traditional surveys to eye tracking available to market research professionals. In this section, we’ll cover recent stats on most used market research methods.

According to a survey, 87% of market researchers worldwide state that at least half of their qualitative research is carried out remotely or online – Qualtrics

Online surveys rank as the most used quantitative method among market research professionals with 85% of respondents who claim they use this method regularly, followed by mobile surveys (47%) and proprietary panels (32%) – Statista

Among qualitative methods, online in-depth interviews with webcams (34%) and online focus groups with webcams (28%) are most commonly used among researchers – Statista

By survey type, nearly half of market research spending (43.8%) was used on customer satisfaction (16.4%), market measurement (15%), user experience surveys (12.4%) – Statista

Nearly 6-in-10 (57.2%) survey responses worldwide were submitted from mobile devices in Q3 2023. That’s a slight increase from 56.2% in Q3 2021 – SurveyMonkey

In the US mobile survey responses accounted for 47.6% of all survey responses (vs. 48.2% on non-mobile devices) in Q3 2023 – SurveyMonkey

On average, online surveys hosted on one of the platforms included 11 questions in 2023. That’s down from 11.8 questions in 2019 – SurveyMonkey

More than half (54%) of online surveys feature 5 or fewer questions per page – SurveyMonkey

More than 6-in-10 (62%) researchers say that their “company depends on their research and insights significantly” – Qualtrics
A majority of researchers have reported an increase in their budgets allocated for customer experience (CX) research (53%), consumer trends (52%), UX research (51%), qualitative research (51%) and brand strategy (50%) – Qualtrics

3. AI in Market Research Statistics

AI is disrupting nearly every industry and job function. Market research is no exception and there are various AI use cases to apply in the everyday work of market researchers. We’ll explore the latest stats on AI adoption rate among market researchers in this section.

Around 47% of researchers worldwide claim that they use AI regularly in their market research activities – Qualtrics

The share of AI adopters among researchers varies depending on the region, with the highest usage in Asia-Pacific & Japan (58%) and the lowest in North America (39%) – Qualtrics

The vast majority (73%) of researchers worldwide claim they’re “very confident” or “extremely confident” on how to apply AI to their market research activities – Qualtrics
Around 1-in-4 researchers state they’re concerned about AI impact outpacing their personal or team skills – Qualtrics

Conclusion

That’s it for my list of market research statistics.

While market research has been around for a while, it has been undergoing constant transformation. It will be interesting to see how AI impacts market research projects.

We update this list of statistics from time to time so feel free to check it later for new insights.

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