How to Scrutinize Your Location Data

In today's data-driven world, location intelligence has become an indispensable asset for organizations across every sector to understand and observe foot traffic to various locations and points of interest (POIs). Mobility data, a powerful component of location intelligence, offers unprecedented insights into real-world consumer behavior, transforming how businesses approach everything from retail analytics to Digital Out-of-Home (DOOH) advertising and urban planning.

However, with great power comes great responsibility – and the potential pitfalls of inaccurate or unreliable data are substantial. Having a clear framework for evaluating the quality and reliability of mobility data will ensure you are getting the accurate and valuable insights your business needs.

Understanding Mobility Data: Your Foundation for Insights

At its core, mobility data measures the movement of pseudo-anonymized devices, mapping how people navigate physical locations and POIs.

This data is woven together from a multitude of datapoints, with the Mobile Advertising ID (MAID) serving as a crucial component. A MAID is a unique identifier unique to a device's operating system. For example, Android devices generate a Google Advertising ID (GAID or AAID), while Apple devices utilize the Identifier for Advertisers (IDFA).

By aggregating millions of MAIDs, we can uncover large-scale behavioral patterns and trends while protecting individual user privacy.

How is Mobility Data helpful?

This data transforms raw signals into actionable insights, helping businesses:

Optimize operations: Understand peak hours, traffic flow, and resource allocation.
Enhance strategic planning: Inform market expansion, site selection, and competitive analysis.
Refine marketing efforts: Target audiences more effectively to measure campaign performance and effectiveness.
Improve omni-channel experiences: Connect online and offline consumer journeys.
Competitive Intelligence: Understand visitation to your competitor locations for market intelligence and conquesting strategy.

Sources of Mobility Data:

Mobility data primarily originates from mobile devices but can also come from GPS signals, Wi-Fi connections, beacons, and more. The key differentiator among these sources lies in their data collection methodologies, validation processes, and commitment to quality. The most reliable platforms ensure diverse and robust data acquisition techniques to build comprehensive datasets.

Key Components of Mobility Data:

Visits and Dwell Time: Understanding how long people stay in a location.
Foot Traffic and Movement Patterns: Analyzing the flow of people and common routes/pathways.

Platforms with robust data integrity are able to transform these raw data points into highly accurate and actionable insights, preventing misleading conclusions drawn from flawed data.

Scrutinize Your Data on These Critical Factors

To ensure your location intelligence fuels truly smarter decisions, scrutinize your data provider on these critical factors:

Data Accuracy & Precision: Assess your supplier's mobile location data for cleanliness, accuracy (proximity to true location), and precision (consistency of data points), as these are all vital for reliable insights.
Data Completeness & Coverage: Assess active user volume and geographic reach.
Data Freshness & Timeliness: Prioritize near real-time processing capabilities as high latency can render insights irrelevant for critical use cases.
Data Privacy & Compliance: Verify adherence to global privacy regulations (e.g., GDPR, CCPA/CPRA) and robust anonymization techniques that prioritize ethical data handling.
Data Methodology & Transparency: Work with companies that put transparency at the forefront of their methodologies and are willing to provide clear documentation of data collection, processing, and validation.

Conclusion

In an increasingly competitive landscape, making informed decisions based on reliable data is not just an advantage—it's a necessity. Scrutinizing the mobility and footfall data behind your location intelligence is paramount to ensuring its quality and relevance. By understanding the data's origins, evaluating its key characteristics, and implementing best practices, you can transform raw signals into truly dependable insights.

This commitment to data integrity and actionable intelligence is a hallmark of The People Platform's offerings, empowering you to understand real-world consumer patterns and behaviors with unparalleled clarity and confidence.

Our data undergoes rigorous sanitization and scrubbing, leveraging best practices to ensure the highest level of integrity and quality in the industry. Our methodology includes:

Careful Data Review: Meticulously examine supplier data for consistency, logical integrity, and outliers.
Investigate Suspicious Data: Perform in-depth analysis of flagged data points to determine their validity and source.
Scrub Synthetic Data: Rigorously identify and remove artificially generated or fraudulent data from the dataset.

Ready to unlock smarter decisions with high-quality mobility data? Contact The People Platform today.

How to Scrutinize Your Location Data