Monthly Patterns

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. This contains aggregated raw counts of visits to POIs from a panel of mobile devices, answering how often people visit, how long they stay, where they came from, where else they go, and more. 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.

Schema

Create a Dewey Data login and navigate to the Table Structure view in the product for a description of each variable.
Monthly Patterns - Foot Traffic

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.

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.

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 ↗️

FAQs

How is the data sourced?

The data is sourced from a panel of mobile devices and aggregated.

How can I be confident the geographic coverage will meet my research needs?

Reach out to [email protected] to request a one-month sample of the data. This will allow you to review all POI covered in the dataset.

What is the source of the POI?

SafeGraph provides the source of POI and geometry used to recognize pings.