Technical Forum

No worries, we know it's a little confusing! Yes you can save up to 50 reports from our database of public locations (essentially the locations that Neighbourlytics have pre-defined - there are 9,300 of them across Australia, and Springly, Greenvale and Villton are all available). Use the search bar on your account 'Front Desk' to search the location that you need, and you will be able to save it directly in to your account.

In addition to accessing these 'public' locations, you also have access to two custom locations - meaning you can define the specific shape of the location that you want reports for. It can be a circle/radius or you can send through an irregular shape for us to process for you. You don't have to submit your request for custom locations yet, so there's no rush. Essentially, whenever you decide that the public locations don't cover the specific area that you need, that's when you want to use the Custom locations.

The "How can I set up a specific location?" article, in our Help Centre, tries to set out a little more about custom vs public locations.

The heat map shows where people spend time but - due to limits in location accuracy - it is not able to be routed back to specific points of interest or individual shops. The data is ideal for indicating which end of the street is busiest, or how the activity levels change from day to evening, but it is not specific enough to determine which side of the street is being used.

For more specific insights into the popularity of particular businesses, the Amenities Mapping tool includes a 'relevance score', which calculates how important each local business is based on the level of digital community interactions with it (ie likes, ratings, reviews etc).

Yes, there are 3 ways to do this:

1. The Insights Reports include an ‘Australian average’ travel distance beside each of the neighbourhood scores.

2. The Discover tool includes the distance travelled for each Australian suburb and the colour scale used on the maps indicates the percentile each suburb sits in ie; Suburb X is 12.3km travelled (in the top 73% of all Australian suburbs)

3. Users can create their own benchmarks by using the custom neighbourhood feature. To do this, request custom neighbourhoods for a series of relevant benchmark locations and compare your focus neighbourhood results to this cohort.

If a user requires quarterly reporting, we recommend using a sample month for each quarter as the data result - ie Jan, Apr, Jul, Oct. This will then provide an insight into lifestyle changes in each season, without 'flattening' the results across 3 months (which would happen if Jan - Mar results were aggregated). Longer term tracking is able to be done using the Activity Over Time tool which will show the monthly change for a location across the last 13 months.

The "important amenities" is created by looking at all the digital activity a place receives - likes, mentions, ratings and reviews - across a 12 month period, with the most recent months weighted more heavily. So businesses and organisations that get a strong score here, have a highly engaged audience, that talk about them often - which can happen whether they are open or not. It's not uncommon to find that real estate agents, or doctors practices do well in these scores as they can often be connected across the community - sponsoring kids sport or other events - which can lift their scores. And similarly, it's not always the cafe with the 'best coffee' that does the strongest, but rather then one with the most loyal local customers.

It's also important to note that places are scored based on their place type - so libraries are only compared to libraries, and accommodation to accommodation. So, if the businesses in question fall into a niche business type, it may be the case that they are strong performers within the context of their category.