At a Glance: This guide will provide definitions and concepts crucial to understanding foot traffic data, as well as actionable insights and data samples that can be leveraged and interpreted. By the end of this article, you should be well on your way to understanding the value of location data, everyday use cases, and next steps.
What is foot traffic data?
Foot traffic data, also known as footfall data, refers to datasets that logs the presence and movement of individuals at a location. Higher foot traffic indicates that customers are frequently visiting a location, such as a store, and that sales will usually increase as a result.
Foot traffic data refers is gathered by anonymous mobile device data and other internet of things (IoT) technologies that show the number of people in a particular region at specific times of the day. This data and its sources can be broken down into two categories: macro level and micro level foot traffic data.
Macro level foot traffic data refers to data sourced from GPS via mobile devices within a specified area. This is considered the most accurate and dependable method of foot traffic data collection. The most common source of macro level foot traffic data is apps that share aggregated location data.
Micro level foot traffic data refers to data sourced within a single brick and mortar location. Common sources of micro level foot traffic data are:
- Wifi
- Bluetooth
- Sensors, like in-store retail counters
Again, this data is most reliable when acquired in real-time at the macro level.
What are some common applications of foot traffic data?
Foot traffic data is used by a variety of businesses to enable foot traffic analytics, helping them understand their customers and competitors.
In retail and financial services, for instance, you could utilize foot traffic data to enhance other forms of customer data, like revenue, work and home data, and demographic data. Real estate, healthcare, insurance, and logistics are other industries that can benefit from foot traffic analysis.
Some common uses include:
- Optimizing store layouts
- Informing marketing, sales, and merchandising strategies
- Setting employee schedules
- Optimizing inventory and supply logistics
- Identifying growth opportunities.
- Analyzing location performance
- Determining the best location hours
- Aiding site selection
- Assessing risk factors for a specific location
- Identifying and analyzing retail trends
- Assessing the maturity of a market or location
- Identifying seasonal/promotional opportunities
- Obtain competitive insights
- Analyze industry or location trends
- Determine ROI for a location, time period, or promotion
Foot traffic data methodology
Unacast collects aggregated GPS data from smartphones and apps with users' opt-in authorization. To provide precise location intelligence, the data is analyzed and contextualized. This information can be used for various purposes, including advertising, audience segmentation, competitive landscaping, urban planning, demand forecasting, site selection, and a gaining general understanding of people-based movement analytics, including migration patterns and shifts in region-based demographics.
Unacast uses a three-step methodology to gather, extrapolate, and correct foot traffic.
1. Gathering the data
We use GPS location data because it is the most reliable. It works by sending signals, or “pings,” from a mobile device to a constellation of satellites. By using triangulation, GPS determines where on the planet your device is, and describes that position using latitude and longitude. Each ping from a device also has a timestamp. Unacast gathers aggregated GPS data from more than 130 million smartphones and mobile apps, with opt-in consent from users. Unacast focuses on sourcing data from only the most transparent and high quality suppliers, with a commitment to user privacy and compliance.
2. Contextualizing the data
Through our algorithms, raw pings are clustered into events that indicate activity, such as dwelling at a location or traveling to retail venues. An array of latitudes and longitudes is difficult to use; that’s why Unacast's data engine translates this raw data into something understandable by adding context.
We also assign events to a census block group (CBG). While this is not the finest-grain map out there, we want to make sure that private information, such as people’s homes, are obfuscated and not discernible to an address. We can add CBGs together to measure neighborhoods, cities, counties, states, and even the entire country. We extrapolate the data to represent the population in question, across 80+ countries, including the U.S.
3. Creating curated datasets
It's important to have data answer the specific questions your team is looking for. You might want to know how many visitors went to a competitor's location and for how long. Or you might want to see the home and work areas of your visitors. Perhaps you want to know where else your customers visit, in addition to your locations. Or you might want to know if your target customers are moving to or from a specific neighborhood or city. Our datasets for Foot Traffic, Trade Areas, Cross Visitation, and Migration Patterns can help you with these questions and more.
Want an in-depth look at foot traffic data points? Explore the Unacast Data Dictionary.
Algorithm and accuracy
Foot traffic data is compared to "ground truth," which is an accurate measurement of visitor traffic frequency. Ground truth is not an estimate. Unacast foot traffic data has shown to have a .93 correlation with ground truth.
Unacast algorithms can accurately depict what is happening on the ground, rather than inferring what could be happening. While an individual store or location could give a partial view of store traffic using sensors or WiFi networks, Unacast data collected from mobile devices provides the necessary accuracy to validate your analysis.
You can read about how Unacast guarantees data accuracy here.
Foot traffic data use cases
There are many use cases for foot traffic, from obvious to more subtle and interesting.
Competitive Intelligence
Foot traffic can be used to benchmark your business against your competitors’ performance. You can see how you stack up against other brands’ visitation trends across locations, allowing you to measure your market share and regional dominance. You can also better understand which competitor locations are most active, and use that to inform your next location, product offerings, or partnerships. Also important is the ability to uncover the profiles and patterns of your competitors’ customers, which Unacast allows you to do with foot traffic trends and aggregated demographics.
Learn more about Unacast's Competitive Intelligence solution.
Site Selection
Site selection is a critical business function for any business with brick and mortar locations. How do you decide where to put your next store or location and why? With Unacast foot traffic data, retailers and real estate investors can understand foot traffic in specific, customizable areas, and see how those trends change over time. On top of understanding foot traffic in a specific neighborhood, area, or store, you can also see macro-level migration trends within neighborhoods, cities, and states to ensure your next investment is sound.
Learn more about Unacast's Site Selection solution.
Site Analysis
Once you have your next store or location, foot traffic is an important indicator for both success and opportunities for improvement. For instance, with foot traffic data you can understand the capture rate of your store and what percentage of visitors are actually converting into paying customers. You can test your store’s product placements, number of store employees, and marketing campaigns to see how these impact foot traffic trends and visitation length. You can learn what types of visitors come into your store, as well as their cross-shopping trends (i.e., where they went before or after your store). You can also learn where your visitors come from, their work or home locations, so you can understand your trade areas and opportunities for new locations. Finally, by identifying migration trends and foot traffic changes early on, you can predict future foot traffic and open or close specific locations as needed to bolster your bottom line.
Learn more about Unacast's Site Analysis solution.
Demand Forecasting & Supply Chain Management
Foot traffic data is an excellent demand forecasting tool. Foot traffic has a consistently high correlation with revenue, and when you understand these trends over time and catch any changes early, you’ll have a better understanding of expected business performance.
You can use foot traffic and migration pattern data to predict revenue and demand at your specific locations, making it easier to optimize your supply chain and plan ahead. You can also use foot traffic to inform investment decisions like on-site logistics, new product offerings, and marketing campaigns.
Learn more about Unacast's Demand Forecasting solution.
How foot traffic is used across industries
There are use cases for foot traffic analysis across various sectors.
Retail
Retail is incredibly reliant on foot traffic to understand store capture rate, run location-based advertising campaigns, analyze foot traffic trends in their stores and those of their competitors, and inform investment decisions like site selection, supply chain, and staffing. Retailers around the world trust Unacast's foot traffic as a critical data set for optimizing performance.
Insurance
Insurance companies use foot traffic data combined with property data, areas of interest, and climate data to strengthen their risk evaluations of residential and commercial buildings and businesses. Foot traffic data makes it easier to optimize insurance prices and the accompanying policies based on real-world data.
Finance
In addition to better serving retail finance with site selection, affluence statistics, and more, foot traffic data enables banks, hedge funds, lending services, and insurance companies to see patterns before they are reflected in quarterly profit reports. Financial services organizations also rely on foot traffic for future investment decisions.
Healthcare
Healthcare institutions use foot traffic to better their operations. Businesses can pinpoint neglected regions, and see how healthcare providers are distributed around a city. This information is highly valuable to assign additional emergency services or plans for growth.
Marketing
Businesses may use foot traffic data to create cost-effective location-based marketing initiatives, raise brand awareness, promote deals and events, attract new clients, and boost foot traffic to physical stores. Leading businesses, ad agencies, and marketing teams use this data to assess ROI, develop lucrative growth strategies, and retain their best customers.
Transportation
The logistics and transportation sectors depend heavily on foot traffic statistics. Organizations may better plan and control how they use logistics services like transportation, fleet management, etc., by observing mobility trends. Foot traffic can inform investment decisions in new transportation needs for optimizing cities' travel behavior.
Government
Government agencies utilize foot traffic intelligence to improve their services and boost performance. Administrations use foot traffic data to enhance public transportation, manage traffic, and create more innovative urban systems.
Real Estate
Real estate firms improve their investment decisions by researching a particular area's mobility trends and patterns via foot traffic. Architects, urban planners, and real estate investors can benefit from foot traffic data to make decisions on residential, retail, commercial, and industrial developments.
Find out why best-in-class organizations in your industry work with Unacast.
Top Foot Traffic Data Providers
Just as important as foot traffic data is to a company’s overall business intelligence efforts, the provider you choose is equally important. Do they have robust, ethically sourced data that covers the regions you need to analyze? Do they require you to use their platform to access the data or does their solution integrate with your existing tech and data stack? Is that integration an elegant, API-based solution or are you stuck downloading a CSV and importing into your existing systems?
Here are a few of the top foot traffic data providers and a quick look at how they stack up.
Unacast
With a focus on privacy-maintaining mobility datasets and migration patterns, we leverage multiple sources (device GPS data, weather, demographics, industry trends, and specific property data), clean and stabilize the data using machine learning, and provide focused, curated datasets.
Carto
Designed for modern location intelligence efforts, Carto is a cloud-native GIS product that was designed to integrate with a modern tech stack.
Infutor
Primarily a consumer identity intelligence provider, their data can be included in location intelligence to provide a deeper spatial analysis.
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.
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.
Veraset
Focused on gathering, curating, and delivering high quality mobility data, they provide raw and pre-processed population movement datasets.
Summary
Businesses across industries utilize foot traffic data to determine visitation trends, where visitors are coming from, and how they are interacting with the competition. When combined with demographic data, these aggregated statistics provide the forecasting tools that help your company make the right investment decisions.
Unacast develops customized consumer foot traffic tracking plans in collaboration with today's business leaders. Thanks to our data-driven human mobility insights, you can evaluate the foot traffic to your venues, trade regions, and competitors.
You'll be able to make intelligent site selection decisions by studying your target consumers' movement trends. Working with our data specialists will help you discover your company's next competitive edge.
Unacast's commitment to the highest quality human mobility insights will provide the complete story for your business, from your next ideal location to your current locations' capture rates, visitor lengths, and customer origins. You'll optimize your marketing and investment decisions and get a true understanding of how you stack up against other brands.
Book a meeting with Unacast to see how we deliver the industry's most trusted and innovative location data. Work with our team of data scientists to get the perfect view of data for your business. If you're ready to level up your data game, speak to Unacast today.
Additional resources
Foot Traffic Webinars
- Webinar Series: A Data Scientist's Guide to Using Foot Traffic for Competitor Analysis
- How to Enhance Your Data Products with Foot Traffic Data
Foot Traffic White Papers & Blogs
- Can Foot Traffic Predict Quarterly Revenue?
- U.S. Recession Tracking and Foot Traffic Data
- How REITs Use Foot Traffic
- An Inside Look: Supply Chain, Consumer Spending, and Retail Foot Traffic
- Mall Foot Traffic in 2022
- The Top Foot Traffic Providers in the U.S.
- Foot Traffic and Commercial Real Estate Analytics
- Urban Planning Data, Foot Traffic, and ESG
- How to Benchmark Against Competitors Using Foot Traffic Data
- Catchment Area Analysis Based on Distance and Foot Traffic
- Restaurant Foot Traffic, Trade Areas, and Site Selection
- How Consumer Foot Traffic Forecasts Business Success
- How to Use Foot Traffic Analytics to Propel Your Business
- How to Enhance Trade Area Analysis Using Foot Traffic Data
Foot Traffic Products & Solutions
- Foot Traffic Data Set
- Retail Foot Traffic Data
- Insurance Foot Traffic Data
- Real Estate Foot Traffic Data
- Financial Services Foot Traffic Data
- Supply Chain & Logistics Foot Traffic Data
