What is Mobile Activity Data All About?

Introducing PlaceIQ to the SiteSeer platform

Maybe you’ve heard the news: SiteSeer has recently partnered with PlaceIQ, a pioneer in the location intelligence space. PlaceIQ’s proprietary visitation data or “foot traffic” helps companies analyze consumer movement to understand competitive trends and behaviors of the shoppers who frequent their locations.

So, what is mobile activity data and where does it come from? PlaceIQ collects data from thousands of cell phone apps and uses a proprietary process. PlaceIQ collects foot traffic to over 4 million commercial points of interest, derived from hundreds of millions of U.S. devices. Data is cleaned and organized and no personal information is tied to a single device. That information can tell users which businesses users frequent, where these users were before and after their visit, and much more.

In the SiteSeer platform, that means an enhanced ability to analyze retail site selections. If you’re a growing retail chain or other multi-site business, you’ll have the ability to find geographical areas with high potential for expansion. You’ll be able to:

• Build a working customer profile based on consumer activity 
• Create better trade areas
• Find the best sites by comparing businesses to each other by their visitor traffic and seeing how these businesses perform compared to others in their chain
• Understand how well you’re penetrating neighborhoods around your business
• Assess how your marketing campaign affects your nearby competition
• Evaluate which shopping centers have the most traffic/are the healthiest in your area

Many SiteSeer users are excited by this news, as this data provides key insights about their own stores, competitors and sites simply by clicking on a location on a map and accessing one of SiteSeer’s dozens of maps, dashboards and reports. More importantly, the data can be integrated into existing models and analytics to increase the accuracy of one’s site selection and forecasting efforts.

Compared to other mobile activity datasets and platforms, SiteSeer offers several advantages:

You get more functionality at a reasonable price.

Well, it’s true that there are “free” tools on the market that allow users to access visitor traffic, we all know that you get what you pay for. These free tools severely limit what data you can view and typically for a single time period. A step up to these companies’ paid version will provide a more comparable experience to SiteSeer’s offering but at a price that is far from free.

Visitor data is great – but it’s not an answer in and of itself.

Data is often an answer looking for a question. For data providers, selling more data licenses is their ultimate goal, and thus for many data providers in this space, the answer to any question is mobile activity data. To answer complex questions like...

• Where is the best site?
• How will my site perform?
• Which markets provide the right expansion opportunities?

...it is important to use the right data for the right question. Although mobile activity data has many applications, rarely can it answer key questions without the insights provided by other data sources and tools.

SiteSeer is a true site selection and market intelligence software.

As a software provider, our goal is to put the best tools for site selection and market planning into the hands of our users. Mobile activity data certainly enhances the user experience, but it does so by making these tools better. For providers of mobile activity data, creating software and site selection tools is secondary to selling more data. Thus, it is important not to confuse a full-feature mapping, analysis and forecasting platform like SiteSeer with the data visualization and reporting tools offered by many other companies in this space.

What you need to know about PlaceIQ data

A few important points about PlaceIQ and their data:

• This company is a pioneer in the industry and was founded in 2011.
• Their GPS sensor accuracy can be as high as 5 meters.
• PlaceIQ’s polygons cover the entire U.S., detailing retail, residences, workplaces and more
• Foot traffic to over 4 million commercial points of interest, derived from hundreds of millions of U.S. mobile devices

SiteSeer’s new features built around PlaceIQ data are excellent. A user can have the software fit a trade area to a store’s visitors, then use SiteSeer to run forecasts based on those trade areas and tie the visitors to other layers in SiteSeer for additional analysis. If you’re a retailer or business chain seeking analytics, you simply won’t find this level of analysis in another solution that offers mobile location data!

We invite you to explore SiteSeer’s newest PlaceIQ features and data for yourself. Contact us for a demo!