Reading country coverage without getting fooled
Country totals are the easiest number to inflate. How to compare two vendors on equal terms before you talk about price.
Totals hide distribution
A single impressive number across global coverage usually means one or two large markets and a long tail of countries with a few hundred rows each. If your workflow needs Germany specifically, the headline total tells you nothing about whether this catalog can serve you.
Ask for the top markets with their counts, and for the number of countries that hold more than a thousand rows. The second figure is the honest measure of breadth.
Depth in one country beats breadth everywhere
Ten thousand recently checked numbers in one country supports a campaign. Ten thousand spread across sixty countries rarely does. Decide which you need before comparing price lists, because the same file can look cheap or expensive depending on that answer.
A practical rule: choose the market first, then compare vendors inside it. Stacking two global totals next to each other tells you almost nothing about the one market you actually need.
Check the definition behind the count
Two vendors can count the same market differently: unique numbers, number-plus-platform pairs, or number-plus-status observations. A file described as unique rows is smaller than one counting every observation, and the price per row is not comparable until you know which definition you are reading.
Asking which unit is being counted is a fair question. The answer usually explains a gap that looked suspicious from the outside.
Coverage decays
A country page that shows the date of the last check per market lets you see which markets are maintained and which were imported once and left alone. Prefer a catalog that publishes its refresh schedule over one that only publishes a total.