Monthly Patterns (Deprecating)

❗️

This data will no longer be available as of March 1st, 2026. Please refer to the new Patterns Plus data from Advan Research.

Overview

Aggregated raw counts of visits to POIs from a panel of mobile devices over a given month, detailing how often people visit, how long they stay, where they came from, where else they go, and more.

This dataset includes visitor and demographic aggregations for points of interest (POIs) in the US over the course of a month. Data is anonymized and aggregated to provide insights into the volume of visitors to certain locations and overall behavioral patterns. SafeGraph Places and Geometry datasets which can be added to Patterns via the Placekey unique identifier for further context.

Key Concepts

Visit Attribution

Advan Research computes the visits/visitors and other metrics inside a POI using the POI’s geometry. They do not apply any dwell time or any concept of “stops”; they rely on the polygon for accuracy. Advan Research has tested their data on 1,500 publicly traded tickers versus (a) top line revenue as reported from the companies and (b) credit card transaction counts on physical locations, and they have determined consistently that in the vast majority of cases filtering for dwell time reduces the signal and makes the correlation/forecasting worse.

Advan Research does not report data when less than 2 visitors are observed from that group. If there are
between 2 and 4 visitors this is reported as 4.

Determining Home Location

Advan Research computes a device’s home/work (night/day) location by computing the time a device spent in each building in the country; then taking the most frequented building. Advan uses a calendar month window (instead of 45 days) to be consistent with the month window of the patterns, and defines “nighttime” as 6pm-8am.

Backfills

Backfill is when we take our most recent locations (i.e., addresses + geofences) and run our visit attribution algorithm backward in time to generate a new history of “backfilled” Patterns. Backfills are typically generated every time new Advan POIs are added (typically monthly, with the exception of August and December) on Advan POIs only. This means historical Patterns will only be present for all Advan POIs, including over 20,000 Industrial POIs, or any other POIs that were released on or before December 2022.

Understanding Visitation and Trade Area Panels

For visitations Advan uses a panel which is consistent across time and can be normalized, in order to generate accurate year-over-year growth metrics. For trade areas visitor_home_cbgs, visitor_home_aggregation, visitor_daytime_cbgs, visitor_country_of_origin Advan uses all the panels they are receiving, for
which they have explicit permission to utilize for trade areas, as some panels prohibit Advan from computing where the cellphone spends its nights, i.e., the "home"; and its days, i.e., the "work" area.

This is a much larger panel, which intersects but does not fully contain the visitation panel, but it is more volatile month-over-month so therefore it should not be used for year-over-year comparisons (use the visitation metrics instead). Advan aligns the visitation & trade area fields by adjusting the trade area values as a percentage of the
visitations, as the sum of the trade area fields would not otherwise equal visits/visitors (Advan does not have a home census block group assigned for each visitor). Advan recommends that users interpret these trade area values as ratios or scaled indicators rather than absolute numbers due to the impact of adjustments (i.e., if one CBG has a value of 100 and another of 50, it means that the first one is about twice as large as the second one).

Updates to underlying Places data

SafeGraph made a disproportionately high number of changes to POIs in April - June 2023, this affected their usability for Advan given the history of millions of POIs were inconsistent with current data (Advan stopped taking the changes in June 2023). In particular, the ratio of shared polygons increased from ~20% to ~40% on the new POIs.

Does this mean that Patterns POI have been unchanged since June 2023?

Yes, POIs are static as of June 2023, so if a given polygon changes ownership we will attribute traffic to the Placekey associated with it as of June 2023 going forward. This was the patterns product before we acquired it, it had annual restatements.

Panel

Along with the Monthly Patterns file, Advan Research also provides a Panel Overview Data to help you better understand the context of the data appearing in Monthly Patterns. They also provide a file containing information on the panel for each day of the week to help with normalization. This file will have rows for each region for each day of the week.

Home Location Distributions by State/Census Block Group ↗️

Number of Visits/Visitors by State ↗️

Normalization Stats ↗️