Weekly Patterns

Overview

Weekly Patterns data provides the same foot traffic data insights from Monthly Patterns on a
weekly basis, tracking data from Monday to the end of day on Sunday each week.

Schema

Create a Dewey Data login and navigate to the Table Structure view in the product for a description of each variable.
Weekly Patterns - Foot Traffic - Full Historical Data (reach out to [email protected] for access)

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.

*These are the same concepts as Advan Research's Monthly Patterns dataset

Panel

Along with the Weekly Patterns file, Advan Research also provides a Panel Overview Data to help you better understand the context of the data appearing in Weekly 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.

What are the differences between Weekly and Monthly Patterns

The best way to think about the two datasets is that the underlying visits and algorithms are the same, but they are aggregated at different timescales and delivered at difference frequencies.

Below are some differences between Weekly Patterns and Patterns:

1. Each delivery of Weekly Patterns covers one week starting Monday and ending end of day on Sunday. The data will be available three days later on Wednesday of each week, providing more frequent actionable data. (Note: A very early, now deprecated, version of Weekly Patterns (v1) went from Sunday to end of day Saturday and was delivered on Tuesdays)
2. In Weekly Patterns, we include a visits_by_each_hour column to enable you to get a
   more detailed view of the week.
3. Weekly Patterns does not include popularity_by_hour (covered by visits_by_each_hour)
   and popularity_by_day (covered by visits_by_each_hour).
4. We update our Places file monthly and start using the new file for our visits generation on the first of each calendar month. This means that if we introduce a new place on the 1st of a month and the Weekly Patterns file straddles two months, you will only see visits for the new place in those days of the week that are in the new month. This edge case only affects a tiny fraction of places each month.