Construction Analytics: The Complete Guide to Using Data to Win More Work

Without the right tools and accurate construction analytics, you could be missing out on potential opportunities, wasting resources, and failing to outpace your competitors.

The construction market is a continually changing industry, so choosing the right construction data is the key to your business’s success.

At Crucible, we work with a range of construction clients on their digital marketing and SEO strategies. We’ve seen first-hand how powerful data can be when it’s applied intelligently, whether that’s identifying the right projects to target, understanding competitor positioning, or planning ahead of demand shifts.

That’s why we’re proud to partner with Barbour ABI, one of the UK’s leading construction intelligence dashboards. In this guide, we’ll walk through what construction analytics is, how their dashboard works, and who it’s built for.

In this article:

What Does the Barbour ABI Analytics dashboard cover?

Who Uses Construction Analytics?

What Makes Construction Analytics Different from Standard Reporting?

Data Quality and Coverage

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is Construction Analytics?

Construction analytics is the use of structured project data, tender records, and company intelligence. This can be used to identify market opportunities, benchmark competitor performance, and make improved business decisions.

Utilising a construction intelligence dashboard like Barbour ABI Analytics enables you to take advantage of verified industry-leading data across thousands of live and pipeline projects. This construction data dashboard can also help you generate more leads and obtain more clients over time.

What Does the Barbour ABI Analytics dashboard Cover?

The Barbour ABI Analytics dashboard covers five core modules, each supported by a dedicated account manager from day one.

Contractor Win Rates

One of the dashboard’s most-used modules. It tracks which businesses are winning contracts, the sectors and regions they’re winning in, and how win rates change over time. This module is powered and tailored by in-house tender research, allowing you to benchmark against competitors and gain more winnable opportunities.

Average Timings

This dashboard compares historical project timelines across various regions and sectors, showing how long projects take to progress between key stages. Sales and specification teams benefit from this module, utilising it to forecast when activity will convert and align outreach strategies with realistic lead times.

Relationships – Who Works with Who

A module that maps the working relationships between project stakeholders; including architects, main contractors, developers, subcontractors, and consultants. You can use this to identify recurring collaboration patterns across different sectors and regions, allowing you to understand competitor networks and where they are not present.

Pipeline Opportunities

Combines backward-looking and forward-looking views of project activity. This module can help teams analyse past performance and identify potential opportunities in the future. With this project pipeline software, you’ll empower your team to prioritise certain regions, allocate resources efficiently, and plan strategies effectively.

Company View

A comprehensive view of any company’s activity across the construction industry: recent projects, the stage of their projects, and which regions and sectors they are most active in. Your team can effectively monitor competitor data and evaluate whether existing clients have a stable future pipeline to support upcoming projects.

Choosing the Right Focus

While all these modules are useful, you may have a preference for one over the other depending on your sector. For example, contractors will prioritise win rates and pipeline, whereas manufacturers and distributors will focus on relationships and geographic demand.

You should always start with the decision you need to make, not with the dashboard itself, and work from there. With Barbour ABI’s  1-2-1 Client Service, they can guide you through the dashboard, and help you make the most return on your investment.

Who Uses Construction Analytics?

The Barbour ABI Analytics dashboard is built for anyone operating in the construction market, but is particularly well-suited to four types of user:

Contractors

Analytics informs bid strategies and competitor analysis, helping contractors understand which firms are winning in target sectors, and where win rates are strongest. This helps businesses focus effort on opportunities with higher success rates, rather than wasting resources in the wrong place.

Building Material Manufacturers

Construction analytics data can be used for specification targeting and market visibility by manufacturers. For example, it can help them identify which architects, contractors, and developers are active in high-value segments, improving overall visibility on shortlists.

Distributors

Construction analytics will help with regional demand planning and depot placement decisions. This enables distributors to understand where construction activity is concentrated, and how project timelines align with regional demand cycles so they can utilise resources more effectively.

Large Subcontractors

Subcontractors can use the dashboard to track opportunities, map which contractors are winning work, and understand how relationship networks influence project access. This is a practical tool for identifying the right firms to target and planning how to approach them.

What Makes Construction Analytics Different from Standard Reporting?

Generic tools, spreadsheets or procurement portals are unable to fill the gap that Barbour’s purpose-built construction intelligence dashboard fills.

Barbour ABI’s data is construction-specific and verified by their in-house experts, not scraped from public sources. Their bespoke dashboards are built around your specific business goals rather than fixed templates.

The dashboard combines historical performance data with forward-looking pipeline intelligence. Crucially, you can move from high-level sector trends all the way down to individual project or company details, all in one place.

For the clients we work with at Crucible, this structured insight is particularly powerful when paired with an SEO and content strategy. By using search data to understand what decision-makers are looking for and Barbour ABI’s intelligence, you can inform where and how to position a business within that demand.

Data Quality and Coverage

How Barbour ABI Verifies Its Data

All construction intelligence on the dashboard is compiled and verified by the UK’s largest research team. Their industry-leading construction data is also used to create construction market reports, which cover various sectors, and are available at any time.

Coverage Across Sectors and Regions

Barbour ABI Analytics provides coverage across major construction sectors in various regions, including residential, commercial, infrastructure, healthcare, education, and industrial. You can filter your exclusive data by sector, region, project value, and construction stage to work with your specific market.

Integration with Power BI

Barbour ABI Analytics is delivered through Power BI dashboards, creating a user-led experience that is designed to your needs. This allows you to make more informed commercial decisions without a steep learning curve, especially for analyst and director-level users.

Explore How Construction Intelligence Can Support Your Commercial Strategy

Get in touch with the Crucible team today to find out how we help construction businesses use data, SEO, and digital marketing to generate more visibility and more leads.

Learn more about Analytics by Barbour ABI today.