If you’re working in public procurement, you already know how powerful data can be. But data only becomes valuable when you use the right tools to interpret it. In Mercell Bidding, you have access to two of the most powerful tools available: Explore and Market Intelligence.

At first glance, they may seem similar, both give you access to tender data and help you find opportunities. But in practice, they serve very different purposes. Understanding how and when to use each tool can help you work faster, think smarter, and ultimately increase your chances of winning more public contracts.

 

Explore: Finding new opportunities

Explore is your go-to tool when you’re actively looking for new tenders or specific business opportunities.
It’s built for discovery and search, helping you locate open or upcoming tenders that match your business profile or strategic interests.

What makes Explore especially powerful is its keyword search capability. You can search using words, phrases, or combinations of terms letting you find opportunities that precisely match your expertise, products, or services. Whether you’re looking for “IT consulting,” “cleaning services,” or “construction framework agreements,” Explore lets you pinpoint what’s relevant instantly.

You can filter by region, deadline, category, or contracting authority to narrow your results and save searches to stay updated automatically as new tenders appear.

Use Explore when you want to:

• Find specific, actionable tenders you can bid on right now.

• Test new idéas and markets by exploring tenders beyond your saved monitoring profile

• Use keywords or phrases to discover niche opportunities in your field.

• Stay updated on newly published tenders and respond quickly.
  
  

Think of Explore as your expedition tool, your way to venture beyond the daily radar and discover opportunities off the beaten path.

 

Market Intelligence: Understanding your market

While Explore focuses on searching for what’s happening now, Market Intelligence helps you analyze what has already happened, and what’s likely to happen next.

Market Intelligence is designed for strategic insight, giving you a broader understanding of your industry, competitors, and buyers. It allows you to explore published tenders, awarded contracts, and expiring contracts, giving you the data you need to work proactively, not just reactively.

Unlike Explore, Market Intelligence offers deep filtering options and lets you analyze procurement data by buyer, supplier, category, region, and time period. You can see which buyers are most active, which suppliers are winning, what values contracts are being awarded at, and when existing agreements will expire.

Use Market Intelligence when you want to:

• Analyze market segments to understand your industry’s size and activity.

• Research competitors and identify who’s winning and why.

• Study buyers and their purchasing patterns.

• Track expiring contracts to prepare for future opportunities.
  
  

Think of Market Intelligence as your strategic compass, the tool that helps you understand the bigger picture, plan your next move, and work proactively with data-driven insights.

 

How the two tools complement each other

In short, Explore helps you find opportunities, while Market Intelligence helps you understand them.
Used together, they form a complete workflow for smarter public sales:

1. Use Market Intelligence to analyze your industry, discover which buyers are active, and track upcoming contract expirations.
2. Then switch to Explore to search for and act on the new tenders that fit your strategy.
3. Complementing the two, make sure to add the most important keywords to your monitoring profile, and ensure you don’t miss any relevant business opportunities.
   
   

By combining both tools, you move from reactive bidding to proactive business development, spotting opportunities before your competitors and approaching them with insight and preparation.

 

In summary: