External factors have a great influence on businesses thus understanding these factors is very crucial when building a statistical forecast. To know whether an external factor has influence on our analysis or not we should consider the following aspects-
1.Consistency- This means how volatile is the data.
2.Accessibility-This is the ease with which we get data.
3.Frequency of getting data- For yearly decision making a quarterly data would do good but for frequent decision making daily data fits best.
4.Data Granularity-The granularity of data refers to the size in which data fields are sub- divided.
To read more- http://revenueanalytics.com/blog/uncovering-external-influences-in-your-analytics/