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 providers come in different stripes. Some collect data from apps or their own platforms. Others aggregate and prepare data, or offer a data processing platform.
Others yet are analytics providers, or software builders that create solutions for different global industries and location intelligence use cases.
Ultimately, they all work together to deliver clean, fresh, privacy secure foot traffic data solutions to the market.
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
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.
Take a look at some of our fellow foot traffic providers, and learn how their platforms, datasets and services can offer insight into the movement and spending patterns of your target audience.
Google Cloud Platform - Data Delivery Mastery
Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is the global standard in safe, secure data delivery. Thanks to Vertix AI, Google’s proprietary machine learning (ML) platform, businesses are able to build and scale effective modeling scenarios.
Building models is one thing – many data scientists struggle to maintain increasingly complex data pipelines as model projections grow and scale. Unacast utilizes the Google Cloud platform to help access real world data and location services worldwide.
“Unacast is an amazing GCP partner. They are using data to do innovative things ranging from tracking COVID-19 to predicting which location is best for a new retail store. This is huge step for our partnership and it will be a game changer!”
-Ingrid Gonzale, Director of Sales, Google
Esri - The GIS Authority
Esri and their ArcGIS platform provide 3D modeling capabilities for a variety of foot traffic data services. For example, their 3D replication of downtown San Francisco can be examined in order to estimate how long it would take to walk to the nearest public transportation.
Esri uses GIS to seamlessly combine geospatial data with imagery in order to create a more robust visualization of a particular POI.
“Esri is a great marketplace, a great consulting presence and has been a tremendous asset for our Unacast team.”
- Scott Valentine, Head of Partner Marketing, Unacast
Snowflake - The World's Data Market
Snowflake offers a seamless experience across multiple public clouds to execute diverse analytic workloads. Labeled as a cross between a data warehouse (a repository where information is collected and processed) and a data lake (information typically stored in its raw form), Snowflake offers businesses the ability to scale massive amounts of data.
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.
“Our strategic partnership with Unacast marries the expertise and data assets of Precisely and Unacast to deliver innovative and highly dynamic demographics data to our customers.”
-Jeff Bank, VP, Strategic Alliance for Precisely
Cherre - Real Estate Insights
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.
How foot traffic providers aid the site selection process
Approximating your demand or viability in a new market can be a perilous endeavor if you’re not analyzing a given data point of interest through the correct lens.
Partnering with a foot traffic provider can help your data scientists hone in on information with a greater degree of granularity, thanks to the dexterity of today’s datasets.
Here are some examples of how companies have deployed foot traffic data to gain a competitive edge in their respective industries:
The restaurant industry has faced a number of challenges over the past couple of years. Expansion into new markets can be a difficult but necessary step for growth. Foot traffic providers deploy a number of strategies to reduce the risk, including:
- Visitation Counts - How many people frequent competitors or restaurants nearby? Assess by the hour, day, week or month – the flexibility to scale your analysis over a period of time can help provide assurance that your proposed plan is a sound one.
- Capture Rate & Area Visitation - Area foot traffic and percent visitation out of total area traffic.
- Visitor Demographics - Who are your customers? What is the average income, educational attainment, age, gender, and race/ethnicity profiles of visitations to a venue like yours?
- Visitation Distributions - Examine venue visitation patterns by the hour, day, hour & day, and median dwell time.
- Trade Area - Distribution of distance from home and work to the venue, and home/work origins of traffic.
- Cross Visitation - Insight into visitor visitation to top venues and facilities, or consumer spend on specific brands.
The commercial real estate (CRE) industry is incredibly data-driven; data science, machine learning (ML) and predictive analytics are commonly used tools of the trade.
CRE businesses are partnering with foot traffic providers to deploy datasets like Unacast’s Migration Patterns to uncover where people are moving in the aftermath of the global pandemic.
Studying this information uncovers emerging areas that are bound to attract both residential and commercial developments.
Looking for the next Austin, Texas – a city that saw real estate prices explode over the pandemic? Although Bloomberg indicates that things are cooling off now, many retailers that opened up shop in 2021 are now settled into a viable and developed market.
Unacast uses GPS location data to measure foot traffic, as it provides the most authentic information from which schema can be developed. By sending signals — or “pings” from mobile devices — to a connected network of satellites, the device locations are triangulated based on positional information like latitude and longitude coordinates.
Unacast then clusters these foot traffic data sources to create customized data for businesses in the form of datasets like Dynamic Trade Areas Data and Cross-Visitation Data.
While businesses are free to interpret this data as they see fit, the value in partnering with a foot traffic provider comes in their ability to “ask” the data the right questions in order to determine very specific outcomes for your business.
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.
