Foot Traffic
The number of visits to a location over a period, the foundation metric for how busy a place is and how that changes over time.
What does Foot Traffic tell me?
Foot Traffic estimates how many visits a location receives during a period. It is the foundation metric for human-mobility analysis: how busy a place is, how that rises and falls over time, and how one location compares to another.
A daily count is the number of unique people at the location that day. Longer cadences sum those daily counts over the period, so a person who comes on several days is counted on each of them, and the period total is not a unique-person count. Figures are estimates calibrated to real-world volume, not a census.
What questions does it answer?
- How busy is this location, and is it trending up or down?
- How does footfall compare across my sites or against nearby locations?
- How did visits respond before, during, and after an event or campaign?
- What is this location's share of activity in its wider area?
- How seasonal is demand here?
Reading this cadence
This cadence is for trend and seasonality work. It adds period-level summaries, a total of visits across the period and the typical single day within it, that absorb day-of-week noise and make period-over-period and year-over-year comparison meaningful.
How it's produced
Foot Traffic is modelled from an aggregated activity signal, corrected for how much of the population that signal represents, and calibrated so the output reflects real-world visit volume.
How to read it
- Compare like for like. Use the same cadence and comparable periods. The typical-day figure (the median daily count) is a per-day value, so it is comparable across periods of different length; the period total grows with the number of days in the period.
- Visitor types. Visits split into people who live in the area (residents), people who work there (workers), and everyone else (other visitors), which separates genuine visitation from the resident and worker baseline. These groups can overlap, a person can be both a worker and a resident at the same location, so the parts need not add up to the total; the total is the most reliable figure.
- Low counts are noisy, and a zero can mean "too little activity to report here," not "nobody came." A confidence indicator, where present, flags rows that are less reliable.
Related metrics
- Visit Length, how long those visitors stayed.
- Trade Areas, where those visitors came from.
- Visitor Demographics, who those visitors are.
Country- and dataset-specific behaviour (coverage, geography units, exclusions, release timing) is documented on each dataset in its country catalog.
Schema
This is the standard schema for the metric. Always check the schema on the specific dataset you're using, since small variations may occur per country, map, or cadence. See the list of datasets using this metric below.
Map columns (e.g. ZIP code, state, brand, polygon) are usually exposed on each dataset as available columns that aren't included by default. They're not listed here because each dataset is connected to a different map and therefore has a different set of map columns available. Open a specific dataset below to see its full schema.
| Column | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| location_id | STRING | Unique identifier of the location. |
| observation_start_date | DATE | Start of the observation period. |
| observation_end_date | DATE | End of the observation period. |
| visits_sum | INTEGER | Estimated sum of unique people per day at the location over the period; a person who visits on several days is counted on each day. |
| visits_p50 | INTEGER | Estimated median of the daily unique-people counts within the period (a typical day). |
| non_resident_non_worker_visits_sum | INTEGER | Sum of the daily counts of visitors who neither live nor work in the area. |
| non_resident_non_worker_visits_p50 | INTEGER | Median daily count of visitors who neither live nor work in the area. |
| resident_visits_sum | INTEGER | Sum of the daily counts of people who live in the area, over the period. |
| resident_visits_p50 | INTEGER | Median daily count of people who live in the area. |
| worker_visits_sum | INTEGER | Sum of the daily counts of people who work in the area, over the period. |
| worker_visits_p50 | INTEGER | Median daily count of people who work in the area. |