Sometimes your sales are soft because something’s broken. Sometimes they are soft because a competitor is eating your lunch. Sometimes they’re soft because the entire economy is pulling back. Knowing the difference can save your team from spinning its wheels or chasing the wrong solution. Consumer sentiment data can be helpful in decrypting what is happening with the macro economy. It’s especially powerful when paired with category interest data. For example, if it felt like you were running in quicksand since the start of 2025, it could have been because consumer sentiment was dropping like a rock.
The gold standard in consumer sentiment data, as far as I can tell, is The University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index. Data is posted twice a month covering the trends in consumer purchasing sentiment. Once as a preliminary (mid-month) read and again as a final (end-of-month) number for each month. This makes it one of the earliest consumer-facing economic indicators available, beating most government data to the punch and giving you an early sense of which way the wind is blowing. It’s a well-established read on how consumers are feeling about the economy (jobs, inflation, income expectations) and it’s one of the fastest macro indicators available.
The index itself is built from a recurring national survey of U.S. households. Each month, about 500 people are asked five key questions designed to gauge how they feel about their personal finances and the broader economy. The questions cover both current conditions and expectations for the future including whether they’re better or worse off financially than a year ago, how they expect their situation to change in the year ahead, and how they view national business conditions over the next 12 months and five years. They’re also asked whether they think it’s a good or bad time to buy major household items, which is a useful signal for discretionary spending.
Respondents are selected using a combination of random-digit dialing and address-based sampling, which ensures the survey reaches a nationally representative mix of U.S. adults. Historically, the interviews have been conducted by live interview over the phone, with trained interviewers asking each participant the same five questions each month. In recent years, they’ve started incorporating online methods as well, but phone remains the backbone of the survey process.
Answers are categorized as positive, negative, or neutral, and then used to calculate three separate indices: current conditions, consumer expectations, and the headline consumer sentiment index. This consistency in who they ask and how they ask keeps the data clean and comparable over time. This is also why economists, investors, and business operators still pay close attention to the results, even decades after the index was first launched.
The result is one of the clearest, fastest signals you can get about what American consumers are feeling and how that might translate into sales.
If you’re running a consumer business, especially in discretionary categories, tracking this index over time can help you contextualize sales performance and spot early signals of headwinds or tailwinds.
I’ve used it to add a macro layer in weekly, monthly and quarterly sales dashboards as well as an input into forecasting. Correlation isn’t always perfect, but directional shifts in sentiment often show up in our topline a few weeks later. It’s become a regular part of several monthly readouts and planning cycles that I have been a part of. And like Google Trends, the data is public, free, and easy to access.
Let me know if you’ve used a better data source! I am all ears.
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