Visitation data is a new module now available in GapMaps Live that provides brands who operate a franchise or multiple bricks and mortar store networks with powerful insights on real-time human movement data to and from locations using authorised location data collected from mobile phones.

GapMaps, a cloud-based mapping software used by more than 500 brands to support their network strategies and location intelligence planning, says the provision of visitation data enables customers to make 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,” says Anthony Villanti, GapMaps Managing Director and Founder.

“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 like schools or shopping centres may be that are driving customers to their stores.

“Importantly, these insights 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,” he said.

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 in GapMaps Live 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 for their competitors’ stores, which is a powerful strategy to seek a competitive advantage and respond strategically or tactically.

“We have more than 500 brands using GapMaps Live across a range of industry sectors where a physical location is required, and visitation data will be a powerful tool that many businesses can’t do without to understand what drives people to any given location,” adds Villanti.

“By further enriching GapMaps Live, it further differentiates our platform and supports our customer acquisition growth plans in a range of industry sectors where a physical location is needed, such as fitness, childcare, healthcare and service stations, amongst others.”

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 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.

“When doing any sort of analysis using location data, it is critical to have confidence that a location visit is actually a visit,” Villanti continues.

“For this reason, we spent the past four years testing and refining mobile device data to ensure the outputs we make available in GapMaps Live 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.

GapMaps’ clients contributing to the company’s growth and benefitting from the powerful data insights includes brands like Domino’s, KFC, Starbucks, Burger King, Subway, McDonalds, Anytime Fitness and Goodyear, amongst many others.