Retailers who operate a franchise or multiple store networks can now access powerful insights on real-time human movement data to and from locations using authorised location data collected from mobile phones.
Available in GapMaps Live, a powerful cloud-based mapping software used by more than 500 brands across 23 countries to support their network strategies and location intelligence planning, the provision of visitation data enables faster and more informed location decisions based on empirical data.
Before visitation data was available, brands would typically conduct costly and time-consuming surveys to understand customer movement patterns in and around a specific location. With that data now available in GapMaps Live, any business can better understand who their customers are, how far they travel to visit their locations, how long they visit for, and what the nearby generators may be that are driving customers to their stores, such as schools or shopping centres.
These insights can help identify potential gaps in a network, inform marketing strategies and understand the cannibalisation impact on an existing store if a new one is opened nearby. For example, consider a fast food brand operating multiple stores each with hundreds of people visiting per day. Everything about their visit is unique to them, but collectively, there are clear patterns in their movements, intentions, motivations, and behaviours.
With visitation data, brands can instantly visualise heatmaps to understand the true catchments for each store and find potential new store locations in areas that are unlikely to impact sales across their existing portfolio. In addition, brands can get the same information about their competitors’ stores, which is a powerful strategy to establish a competitive advantage.
Today, brands are using GapMaps Live across a range of industry sectors where a physical location is required, and visitation data is a powerful tool that many businesses use to understand what drives people to any given location. Network planners can quickly assess where people travel from and to when visiting their stores, frequency of visits, demographic profiles and where people live, work, shop, recreate, travel, learn and play, which is a gamechanger in planning new developments and assessing the potential impact on an existing store.
GapMaps Live is an easy-to-use platform for brands to validate and make important location decisions with increased confidence and reduced risk. This is all possible based on the ability to visualise in maps a range of critical data sets, which now includes visitation data. Other data sets may include geographic, demographic, economic, customer or competitor intelligence.
GapMaps believes that when doing any sort of analysis using location data, it is critical to have confidence that a location visit is actually a visit. For that reason, we have spent the past four years testing and refining mobile device data to ensure the outputs we make available only include observations where we know the device origin prior to the visit, the visit dwell time and the device destination after the visit.
This level of accuracy has been verified with actual customer research studies used to gather customer visitation insights; against sales potential data provided by retailers and landlords and against cannibalisation impacts provided by clients for new store openings.
Visitation data provides a host of benefits and qualities that make it a valuable addition to location intelligence services. To understand more and see how you could use it in your network planning, we have provided four use cases as examples. This includes understanding your customers, optimising marketing strategies, identifying network cannibalisation, and how to gain a competitive advantage. You can find more information here.
If you would like to find out more about GapMaps Live or see a demonstration of the platform or visitation data, please do get in touch.
