Recently, Tango Analytics announced an exciting partnership with UberMedia. This partnership will provide retailers with information and analysis, using UberMedia’s mobile data points, to identify customers and their trip patterns centered on their visit to a store location.

With that in mind, we want to give you a deeper analysis of the benefits our customers receive by combining this data with our predictive analytics capabilities.

Where is the data from?

First, a little background. UberMedia data is sourced from the GPS signals of mobile devices that have opted into advertising that is enabled by UberMedia. These are not triangulations from tower data, nor are they vehicle-based GPS signals. Instead, they are actual signals from the phones of actual people.

As to privacy, UberMedia’s data has no personally identifiable information, and home and work-based information is aggregated to neighborhood (block group) level to avoid disclosure of any specific addresses.

Not all Big Data is created equal

The specific advantage of UberMedia’s data source is that we can geo-fence an actual store location and detect when a mobile device enters that geo-fence to a three meter resolution. Most existing data sources are only accurate to a 250 meter resolution – making them much less reliable. This means that instead of capturing customers that pass by the location or are in the same shopping center, we can isolate strictly on those customers who have actually entered the store.

This is groundbreaking in that it creates opportunities for data analysis for many location-based businesses that have previously been unable to collect accurate customer data, Including restaurants, convenience stores, dollar stores and any other businesses that do not actively capture customer specific data or just use in-store surveys.

But even for retail and restaurant chains that do collect customer data, the UberMedia data can lead to valuable insights, as we can track where the customer was before and after they visited a store to be able to assess what really drives a location. This is especially useful in terms of downtown, tourist, highway, and transit-oriented locations.

Here are some illustrations of what we can do in some particular areas of analysis:

Store-Level Customer Analytics

• Customer and worker profile: Derived from the “likely home” and “likely work” locations of the phones that visit the store
• Generator analysis: By looking at the places a customer visited before and after their visit to the store, we can understand which types of activities generate visits to the store. These frequently are home, work, shopping, tourism, highway or other activities. We can also break this down by day part.
• Again by looking at the places a customer visited before and after they visited a store, we can determine which specific stores are most beneficial as co-tenants, and we can also determine how much a particular brand benefits from cross-shopping.

Traffic flows

• By putting a geo-fence around an intersection, we can determine what the flows are through that intersection at various times of day, allowing us to determine which corner is the hot direction during the morning and evening commute.
• Similarly, we can use the relative intensity of traffic flowing past a store’s ingress-egress point to provide a much more specific and accurate index of traffic intensity than can be derived from the typical governmental traffic count. This can also be broken down by time of day.

Competitor Analysis

Everything we can do for your stores we can also do for a competitor. This enables us to understand what is driving competitors’ store traffic, and it also allows us to measure the relative volume level of competitor’s stores as determined by the number of phone signals they capture.

These are just a few examples of the many different analyses that can be performed using this remarkable data source — and there are many other ways that combining UberMedia data with Tango Analytics sophisticated predictive analytics capabilities that will transform your understanding of your business and your customer.

If you would like to learn more, download Tango’s UberMedia datasheet below.