Mobile Insights

Mobile Insights

Overview 

Mobile Insights are analytics based on user behavior within defined location-specific geofences. These insights reveal patterns such as foot traffic, dwell time, and user demographics about these geofenced locations. It provides easy to access and pre-processed mobile data on over 4 million businesses and shopping centers throughout the US. There is no credit system, and no processing wait time; your access to the data is unlimited. 

How can I leverage this to support my organization?  

  1. Use Mobile Insights as a surrogate for your own customer data and understand your customer’s visitation patterns. With that, generate trade areas, estimate cannibalization and maximize your market coverage 
  2. Analyze a prospective site’s anchor tenant or shopping center. Interactively define trade areas to examine demographics and other key datasets. Understand the true impact on existing sites by leveraging a realistic trade area in cannibalization studies. Determine if the hours and other temporal visitation patterns of activity are synonymous with your brand’s activity. 
  3. Gain insights about your competitors to evaluate their relative strength and visitation numbers. Look for whitespace in the market with access to each competitor’s customer visitation maps. Determine areas for increased marketing to out-maneuver your competitors with a hyper local marketing strategy. 
  4. Identify tourism hotspots and quantify monthly tourist draw. Examine how far visitors are coming from to determine what kind of tourist visitation each location is receiving. 

Methodology 

Mobile Insights is powered by Near (formerly UberMedia), which tracks approximately 20% of all devices in the US. Mobile Insights contains data from the previous twelve months and is updated monthly for near real-time insights. 

What information is provided for each geofence? 

  1. Sitewise Panel: Instantly access over 12 different charts and statistics to visualize the customer visitation patterns from each geofence. 
    1. Visitors by distance traveled from home decay chart. 

    2. Customer visitation by the hour, day of the week, and by month. 


      Chart, bar chart Description automatically generated       
    3. % of visitors identified as tourists each month. 
    4. Same-brand rankings across State and DMA. 
    5. Nearby same-category visitation level comparisons.

       
    6. Visitors by dwell time. 
  2. Customer Visitation Patterns: No processing wait time to see the customer distribution for each geofence. 
    1. Create likely home location visitor distribution maps 
    2. Combine statistics and market knowledge to interactively build trade areas for each location 
  3. Mobile Insights Summary: Unlimited presentation quality reports for any geofence.  
    1. All the information contained within the Mobile Insights Panel 
    2. Analyze the location’s customer draw and summarize the demographics within the trade area 

How do I access this information in Sitewise? 

  1. Open the Mobile Insights layer group in your Sitewise account and turn on the geofences layer.  
    1. This layer will show all available geofences within Mobile Insights.  
    2. Green outlines represent owned geofences, which represent a single business or shopping center.  
    3. Gray outlines represent shared polygons that have multiple businesses contained in the same shape. Shared polygon visits are attributed based on a machine learning allocation algorithm and may not be as reliable, although they are still directionally useful. 
  2. Click on the geofence you want to analyze.  
    1. If the point clicked on the map is contained within two geofences, ensure you select the geofence name within the info box associated with the location you want to investigate. 
  3. Click on the magnifying glass  to open the Mobile Insights Panel and get access to the other tools. 
    1. See here a breakdown of the metrics captured by Mobile Insights 
    2. The breakdown also includes charts which break down visits by distance, month, hour, and day.  
    3. Notice that if the cursor hovers over a graph, it details the exact figure of that bar in the graph. 
  4. Click on the Home icon  near the top of the panel to view the customer distribution maps relevant to the selected geofenced location.  
    5. NotesNote: Once you click the home icon, the map should zoom out to display the distribution. You may need to zoom out further in some cases to see the full extent.
  5. To access the Mobile Insights Report, click on the print icon  near the top of the panel.
     
    1. Define what percentage of the selected locations trade area to capture in the report 
    2. Choose whether you want to compare the insights drawn from businesses close by or locations within the same brand.  
    3. Export as an Excel or PDF. 
For more information and tips to maximize your use of Mobile Insights, feel free to contact the Sitewise team!  

FAQs 

I don’t have this data in my account. How do I get access to it?
Mobile Insight data is 3rd party data that is licensed through Sitewise. If you’re interested in licensing it, connect with the Sitewise Team. 
The layer doesn’t have a geofence that I need/there isn’t a geofence around one of my locations.
Connect with the Sitewise Team to request for us to add it into Sitewise as a new geofence. 
  1. When requesting a new geofence, please also include the Address, City, State, ZIP code, Latitude, and Longitude of the location you wish to have geofenced. 
  2. Please note that the typical wait time for this is 3-4 months. 
What is the coverage for Mobile Insights?
Mobile Insights covers buildings in the US. 
What are Estimated Visits?
Estimated visits show an estimate of the real-world number of visits made to the specific location and shows when foot traffic rose and fell throughout the chosen time period.  
It uses machine learning to derive an estimate of how many people visited this place during this time period. 
How is the Tourist % calculated?
The tourist visit percentage is the % of visits from over 100 miles away from the location. 
How are Visits to Large Structures/Indoor Malls attributed?
Visits are attributed to the containing element i.e. the indoor mall or airport, and not to any individual tenants. This is the most accurate option given the limitations of GPS inside such structures (e.g., indoor malls, casinos, hotels). 
Where does Mobile Data Come From?
Mobile location data is geo or spatial data from smartphones.  When a user installs an app, they are often asked to share their location data with the company which provides the app and other companies who are partners with the app publisher.  
Users can opt in to location sharing (or choose not to opt in). When they opt in, then their phone collects data and shares it with the publisher companies. 


Why is the default capture rate 70%? Can I change it?
The default percentage, 70%, is a ‘sweet spot’ for capturing enough of a trade area that contains customers who can likely be considered ‘regular’ customers, in what might be called the customer base. By increasing this percentage, it runs the risk of including those that visited from far away distances, who are unlikely to be regular customers. By decreasing it, you might miss out on part of the customer base.  
  1. You’re able to choose whatever capture rate you’d like, but 70% is usually a good starting point and might be all you need! 
  2. For locations like a shopping mall, which includes many stores within its footprint, or an amusement park, people may travel large distances to visit. What this means is that the trade area created with 70% will be massive, sometimes encompassing multiple states or the country, which can be difficult to generate and doesn’t provide as valuable information. 
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