What is the Visits Trend analytic?
The Visits Trend analytic is an updated version of the Footfall Trend analytic. It is available from the Explore section.
The Visits Trend analytic helps users understand how visits to a neighborhood, industry or chain are changing over time. Users can see the % increase or decrease in visits compared to their start date. The number of visits recorded on this date effectively becomes a baseline value that serves to benchmark the trend.
What can it tell me?
The analytic helps users understand how visits are trending from a specific point in time.
- By analyzing a neighborhood, users can see whether a new store opening has affected visits to the area
- By analyzing a chain, they can see whether a new product launch has impacted visits to those outlets
- By analyzing a specific industry, they can see how it has been impacted by macro events such as the Covid-19 outbreak
What are the key features?
- Forecast trend: clicking the forecast trend button lets the user view 3 months into the future.
- Insights panel: clicking “Show Insights” opens the insights panel. Here the key statistics of the data are interpreted for the user.
- Export data: clicking “Export Data” begins a download of the data as a .csv file.
How do I use this analytic?
- From the Explore section, the user can use the map navigation or search bar to find what they wish to analyze.
- The user can then click the Visits Trend button from the side panel.
- The Visits Trend section will open up revealing the new analytic. From here the user can see the change in visits as a percentage from the start of the date range. By default, this will be 6 months. From this screen the user can change the date range using the calendar icon; download the data using the export button, or switch between the Weekly and Monthly tabs to change the granularity of the analysis.
- By clicking Show Insights the user will be able to see a list of questions that the data answers. Clicking a question will reveal the answer.
- Clicking Forecast Trend from the map legend will activate the predictive trend. Users will be able to see how Almanac predicts the visits to their selection will change over time. Users can now click the margin of error icon to view the error margin displayed on the graph.
How is this analytic calculated?
Change in Visits
The Visits Trend analytic takes the number of visits recorded on the start date that the user selects and then compares this to the number of visits recorded on each of the following weeks or months (depending on whether they’re on the weekly or monthly tab). The start date effectively becomes a baseline value, and users can see the trend of visits compared to that value for each of the following timeslots.
[ For example; a user wants to analyze the trend of visits to Little Havana in Miami since February 2020. The number of visits recorded on this date was 10,000 visits. In March 2020, this dropped to 7,500 visits. The analytic would display the value for March 2020 as -25%.
In April 2020, the number of visits dropped to 6,000 visits. Here the analytic would display -40%. This is because the analytic compares each timeslot (each week or month, depending on what tab the user is on) with the initial baseline value. In this case, that’s 10,000.]
Visits
The visits are calculated by processing raw location data from mobile devices. From this data, we identify when a mobile device is visiting a location as opposed to traveling. We then connect these visits to Places – points of interest within our database. Click here for more details.
Forecast Trend
The forecast trend is calculated by looking at the seasonal patterns of visits to the user’s selection (time of day, day of week, month of year), as well as the recent trend (in recent months, are visits increasing or decreasing?) of visits to their selection.
