Point Inside Blog Differentiating Driving Traffic From Foot Traffic in Retail Space Explorer

Point Inside has been using cellphone data to determine the number of people who visit different shopping centers and particular tenants within those venues. As we were looking at this data, we noticed that we were receiving records from nearby highway and road traffic as well as foot traffic within the venues. In some cases, cars passing by were significantly inflating our estimate of how many people visited a venue, which inflated the shopping center's overall popularity ranking. This issue was also plainly visible to Retail Space Explorer users when displaying foot traffic on our venue maps, as shown below. Notice the clear road way pattern within the heat-map which results in distorted visitor counts and for those tenants nearest these roadways as well as a distorted venue popularity rating.