An Intro to Movement Data: What it is and Why it Matters

Movement data is data about how people move through the physical world. It’s derived from anonymized location signals off mobile devices, and it’s used across retail, commercial real estate, finance, and a growing list of other industries.

If you’ve ever seen a report that says a store received 15,000 visits last month, or that a shopping center’s traffic is up 8% year over year, that came from movement data.

Foot Traffic, Trade Area, and Other Common Terms

A lot of terminology in this space gets used interchangeably. Here are the ones worth knowing.

Foot Traffic: This is the most common term. It refers to how many people visit a physical location such as a store, restaurant, mall, or city block. Retailers have used this phrase for decades. In Europe you’ll often hear footfall instead.

Mobility Data: A broader, more encompassing  term. Foot traffic tells us how many people showed up at a specific place, while mobility data also covers where they came from, what else they visited, and how travel patterns shift over time. Think of foot traffic as one slice of the bigger mobility data picture.

Trade Area: This is the geographic region a location draws its visitors from. The old way was to draw a radius on a map. Now, movement data lets you build trade areas based on where visitors actually live and work, which often looks very different.

Dwell Time: How long someone stays during a single visit. Dwell time is useful for understanding the nature of visits and benchmarking across competitors.

Visits vs. Visitors: People tend to mix these terms up. Visits = total trips, including repeats. Visitors = unique people. Someone who goes to the same coffee shop every weekday generates five visits but counts as one visitor. Most datasets report visits.

How Does Movement Data Actually Work?

The short version:

• Anonymized location signals are collected from mobile devices at scale
• Signals are cleaned, normalized, and matched against databases of real-world places (points of interest, or POIs)
• When a device’s signal falls within a known location’s footprint, that’s recorded as a visit
• Since no provider can see every device, statistical models scale the sample up to represent the broader population. While most models use a simple ratio based on the number of devices seen in the area, Dataplor uses additional factors like online popularity and modeling off the POI brand and category to arrive at a more accurate estimate of foot traffic.

What Can Brands Do With This Information?

Site Selection: Evaluate potential locations based on traffic and visitor profiles

Competitive Benchmarking: Compare your traffic against competitors

Portfolio Monitoring: Track trends across your own locations

Investment Research: Use foot traffic as a leading indicator of company performance

Urban Planning: Understand commuting patterns and pedestrian flows

Product Distribution: CPG companies can discover which stores to prioritize

Common Questions About Movement Data

Is this data tracking individuals?

No. The location signals come from devices where users have opted into location sharing. The data is anonymized and aggregated, so no names and no personal identifiers ever enter the Dataplor ecosystem. The goal is to understand patterns at a location level, not to track specific people.

Does this work outside the US?

It depends on the data provider. Many started offering US-only data and have limited international coverage. Device panels and POI quality vary significantly by region. If you operate globally, don’t just ask whether your provider has data in a country, ask how deep it is and how accurate the foundational POI data is.

Who uses this?

Retail and restaurant brands, commercial real estate firms, financial services (from hedge funds to insurance carriers, and everything in between), marketing agencies, CPG companies, tourism and economic development organizations, and increasingly tech companies that use POI and traffic data as a foundational layer in their own products.

What should I look for in a provider?

• Geographic Coverage: Does it cover the regions and categories you care about, and how deep does it go?
• POI Quality: Visit data is only as good as the map of places it’s matched against.
• Methodology: How is the modeling done, and how reflective of the real world is it?
• Update Cadence: How often is the data refreshed, and does that match your workflow?

Getting Started

Regardless of what you call it, the goal remains the same: turn human movement into action for your business to both accelerate growth and mitigate downside risk. Talk to us to learn more.