Foot traffic data providers can help you make better investment decisions in real estate, retail, the supply chain, and beyond.
Location intelligence can provide your business with valuable insight. Spending habits and migration patterns of consumers within a particular area are all within reach.
The old saying “there’s no such thing as too much information” applies in harnessing the power of foot traffic data.
Whether you’re looking to pinpoint a new store location, or learn how your competitors are performing, let’s examine the top foot traffic providers in the United States.
What does a foot traffic data provider do?
Foot traffic data is available from a variety of sources — each with their own collection methods and product offerings. Some foot traffic data providers source their information directly from their own apps, platforms, or even proprietary equipment.
Other providers aggregate data from multiple sources — either offered as raw data with processing services sold alongside them or they offer cleaned and stabilized datasets for easier use.
Providers that primarily focus on analytics will often source custom data sets based on the client’s needs for any given project.
Each of these approaches can be bundled or marketed as solutions for specific regions or global applications and are often part of a broader location intelligence solution.
To put things in perspective, let’s take a quick look at how we source foot traffic data at Unacast.
Aggregate Data Sources
We start by gathering data from multiple sources like GPS location data from 130M+ smartphones and mobile apps, as well as demographic, purchase history data, weather conditions, and more. This allows the creation of robust and wide-ranging datasets of higher quality.
The data is then cleaned, corrected, and pre-processed before being run through our machine learning (ML) process.
Analyzed via Machine Learning
From these prepped data sources, we feed the data into machine learning models designed to find relationships between the different sources and identify key insights.
Each machine learning algorithm is created and trained on training datasets and then evaluated on a validation set in order to optimize it and gauge its performance. Our machine learning models are only used in production once they meet our standards. Once deployed, it runs on new data as it becomes available to calculate mobility insights.
Create Curated Datasets
Once our foot traffic data has been stabilized, cleaned, and ML analyzed, we build datasets for specific regions, industries, and use cases. These curated datasets provide our clients with high-quality foot traffic data, focused on the insights and connections they need.
Understanding the power of high quality foot traffic data
Investors, urban planners and retailers alike are increasingly relying on location data obtained from consumer devices in order to improve the visibility of their planning and demand forecasting processes.
Real time foot traffic is valuable in such use cases.
Device information can capture how much time is spent in particular points of interest (POIs). This could be anything from a retail store to a football stadium.
Savvy business operators harness the insights from this data in order to understand the movement patterns of the people within a certain geographic region. Let’s say you’re looking to open a storefront on the corner of a busy metropolitan block.
Location data can tell you when the area surrounding your proposed shop experiences heightened traffic, so you can adjust to ensure your retail store is open when the immediate vicinity is busiest.
Competitor analysis data can tell you the visitation trends from businesses that may be taking your ideal customers as well.
There are a number of ways to examine an aggregated dataset in order to obtain a clear picture of what they’re doing well – for example, how long are shoppers spending in the store?
With the knowledge obtained from this data, businesses can make real-time decisions based upon actual intelligence, rather than estimating or waiting for statistics and analytics that are only able to capture a moment in time.
Foot traffic data providers
Unacast
Effectively leveraging the power of foot traffic data requires high-quality data and analyses. At Unacast, we provide foot traffic data for organizations like yours to determine the who, when and where for your desired locations. We also partner with organizations that focus on providing in-depth demographic and industry-specific data.
When assessing foot traffic data providers it’s important to understand what they provide and how you can access it. Do they provide raw data or specific datasets ready to be integrated into your location intelligence efforts? Do they only provide data or do they provide analysis as well? Do they only provide their data as part of a larger solution?
Before we look at other providers on the market, allow us to answer those questions about Unacast’s data:
BlueFox
BlueFox provides a modern, cloud-based solution with a robust API that allows integration with third-party (3P) systems.
Carto
Designed for modern location intelligence efforts, Carto is a cloud-native GIS product that was designed to integrate with a modern tech stack.
Cherre
Cherre focuses on the real estate and insurance industry to identify actionable data patterns and opportunities faster than the market. The ability to add third-party and internal real estate data pipelines to a management and analytics platform allows businesses to make decisions about affluent or densely-populated areas with demographics that represent their target audience.
CleverMaps
The CleverMaps platform is an analytics platform designed to bridge business and location intelligence efforts. Multiple types of data are available in their data marketplace
Placer AI
Placer AI gives you unprecedented visibility into consumer foot traffic. The company harnesses mobile data from millions of devices and applies the latest tools to generate accurate insights and behavioral predictions for any store or location.
Precisely - Dynamic Demographics
Precisely is focused on the retail sector with an ability to provide detailed data for markets like Europe and Australia. Unacast has partnered with Precisely to offer multinational retailers unprecedented insight into the foot traffic data, as noted by Precisely’s Data Integrity Suite service.
Combined with Unacast’s ability to scale data with any level of granularity offers new levels of Enterprise Intelligence (IQ) for businesses as they investigate new markets.
SafeGraph
SafeGraph has a mission to grant open access to geospatial datasets like points of interest and foot traffic. They work to empower firms with better analytics and geolocation intelligence.
Snowflake
Snowflake is a data marketplace offering foot traffic data from multiple providers in both raw and curated forms.
Veraset
Focused on gathering, curating, and delivering high quality mobility data, they provide raw and pre-processed population movement datasets.
Use Cases for Foot Traffic Data
Regardless of where you source the data, foot traffic data has a wide range of applications — and savvy business intelligence efforts will always be looking for new insights and new ways to parse their existing data. That said, the primary uses for foot traffic data include forecasting, site selection, site performance evaluation, and competitive intelligence.
Forecasting
From supply chain optimizations to accurate revenue predictions, forecasting is critical for any retail company. By sourcing and analyzing accurate foot traffic data, businesses identify consumer trends and evolving location needs quicker — allowing for more accurate planning and forecasting.
Site Selection
Successfully expanding or developing properties in commercial real estate, retail, and industrial sectors all require careful site selection. Thorough foot traffic analysis can help identify which locations have the greatest revenue potential as well as help clearly determine any challenges your business should expect.
Site Performance Evaluation
Foot traffic data can help clearly identify optimization and efficiency opportunities. By knowing where people are spending their time and money, businesses can ensure there’s adequate product on hand to meet their needs. On the other hand, knowing when traffic is trending downwards can help make the hard decisions surrounding consolidating and shuttering locations to keep the company healthy.
Competitive Intelligence
Better knowing your competitors leads to more effective strategies. By monitoring foot traffic trends, you can identify opportunities for disruptive expansion or develop targeted strategies to capture traffic, and revenue, before it gets to your competitors’ locations.
Foot Traffic Use Cases by Industry
Retail
Understanding the customers’ journey up to, during, and after visiting retail locations, is critical to building an insightful, data-driven strategy for everything from inventory optimization, sales and promotions, special events, and expansion. Building connections and identifying consumer trends ensures retail companies can optimize, forecast, and plan with confidence.
Insurance
By combining foot traffic data with property data, points of interest, weather data, and more, insurance companies can better assess real-world risks for both residential and commercial properties. These more-accurate assessments help insurance companies design better policies and products as well as set premiums accordingly.
Supply Chain
Consumer packaged goods, manufacturing, transportation, warehousing, e-commerce and other logistics-based companies greatly benefit from insightful foot traffic data. Whether it’s route optimization, inventory management, or site selection — accurately understanding regional mobility helps drive better decisions.
Real Estate
Commercial real estate development leverages foot traffic data for everything from site selection and competitor analysis to correctly analyzing a location’s performance or finding the perfect audience for their next development. Regional foot traffic data can even help drive architectural choices — helping ensure that the most likely population to use your new development will enjoy their time there.
Financial Services
Successful investment decisions are built on accurate data. Knowing consumer trends in an area helps analyze historical performance and more accurately forecast future revenue and traffic. These benchmarks and insights are critical to optimizing an investment portfolio.
Unacast makes understanding foot traffic trends easy
Foot traffic analysis — and the datasets that inform it — can be complex. Partnering with Unacast, or any of the data providers outlined in this article, streamlines the way you interpret these large volumes of information.
We strive to simplify and improve your decision-making processes. By partnering with a trusted foot traffic provider, you’re essentially enlisting the services of expert data scientists who “speak the language” and have a deep understanding of how foot traffic data can take the mystery out of site selection.
If you’re in the market for clean, reliable and decision-ready location data, contact Unacast to learn more about how our actionable intelligence can empower your next big move.
