Understanding consumer behavior is becoming more and more critical as businesses seek to find innovative ways to survive and thrive in a period of constant change. In the last few years, the market has seen significant changes in the way people shop, travel, dine and purchase goods. As a business, when it comes to understanding the constant change in consumer behaviors, having human movement data is key– though you can not adequately understand human movement, and what its implications are, without accurate points of interest (or POIs).
Many vendors sell multiple listings of POIs and brand locations that are mainly scraped from the websites of brands themselves. Additionally, these vendors will pair the POI data with human movement data, in order to provide foot traffic metrics and footfall estimates. This is a quality-in/quality-out type of pairing, and more often than not, companies using these types of vendors will be missing quality in POIs or in movement data.
Quality in Human Movement Data
Let’s first address “quality” in human movement data. Human movement data, often called mobile location data, is sourced from mobile devices. Apps install software development kits, or SDKs (either special-built to collect location or for advertising), which then get permission from the operating system to collect GPS data, from the GPS receiver in the device. The app publishers are paid based on the number of devices that opt in to share location, and also the number of data points those devices emit. In a system where monetization happens via volume, not quality, an ecosystem has emerged which is ripe for gaming via fraudulent data. Any insights gleaned from a foundation of fraudulent data are near worthless.
This is where Near comes in. With over 10 years of experience in the mobile app space, (first as an app publisher), Near has evolved and is also the expert in human movement data, now providing a data intelligence platform. Near has spent years perfecting Machine Learning algorithms to clean device data and ensure that the data in our massive human movement database is as clean as can be, as well as accurately represent human movement. As a business owner, be wary of vendors who wave their hands about data quality or only speak of panels like some sort of “magic bullet” to work around fraud. Near’s global database of rigorously scrubbed human movement data is the gold standard that delivers confidence to customers that use the data so they can make strategic and critical decisions for real estate, marketing, and operations.
Quality in Places Data
When it comes to POIs, many companies talk about “algorithmically determined visits” where devices that are near POIs, get lumped in as visitors to obtain decent sample sizes. This is because, underneath their analysis, they are using a point radius or an approximation to determine visitation. This method doesn’t achieve results you can trust with confidence. This can generate an incomplete picture of where your customers are going, and you’ll have a difficult time identifying whether people went to say a McDonald’s, for example, or the upscale steak house across the street.
Near’s Data Intelligence platform is based on hand-drawn, human-reviewed geo-boundaries that outline the exact boundary of a storefront, restaurant, park, tourist destination, or any other place of interest. This accuracy turns POIs into “places”– unlocking the ability to use Place data for applications in both the operational space such as attracting tenants, doing site selection, or monitoring competitive footfall, and the marketing intelligence space, which includes building audience segments, measuring ROI, and competitive conquesting.
Imagine trying to create a marketing campaign that resonates with prospects and customers– it’s critical to understand who they are and to also reach them at scale. If the underlying consumer data is inaccurate, developing those segments accurately is impossible. Additionally, accurate place information is needed for profile building, so businesses can begin to better understand their customers, as well as understand who their competitors are, and who their competitors are attracting.
Defining individual audiences for each POI is when you truly start to unlock the secret sauce of what you can not only do with the data, but also how you can target and then create a more trusted, human, and personalized experience. For business success, accurate target and marketing initiatives must include solid place information and accurate data. Place information and accurate data are also key ingredients for ROI measurement, so you know the success of your target marketing. It’s not enough in today’s competitive landscape to only serve up an ad that somebody drives by, or simply know that a customer went to a store three stores down. You need to know that your ad actually went to the person you brought to the door of your location, and that’s the competitive advantage that businesses must have to succeed.
For this, turn to Near’s shared source of truth for consumer behavior data across multiple departments. Near’s products provide the lens to view consumer behavior from a people focus, or a place focus, in order to glean actionable insights– giving businesses the confidence to make strategic data-driven decisions.
Learn more here: https://near.com/
