Technical Forum

Here is some guidance on how to choose the best custom location size and shape. But if you're still unsure on whether your locations will provide good results, just send me through the locations and I can pass them on to our team to confirm their viability for use as custom boundaries. Best size: Depending on your geographic area, custom locations smaller than 3km2 (2km2 in CBD locations) may yield limited data due to a smaller sample size, potentially affecting the robustness of your findings. Some of our data results have an error of up to 50m, so shapes that are too 'narrow' can be problematic. ‍In instances where you are seeking to analyse the lifestyle around a specific location - such as a shopping centre or park - we recommend including a 1-block radius around this location to ensure you pick up all relevant activity. Best shape: The strength of our data is to provide you with the ‘context’ around your focus area. For this reason the best shape for a data boundary is usually a circle around your area of focus. We recommend a 1km radius for typical neighbourhoods, smaller for CBD locations, and larger for regional locations. The exception for this, is where there is a point of interest within your context that you wish to exclude from analysis so that it does not ‘contaminate’ your data. For example, if you are trying to understand visitation to your town centre, and there is a hospital on the town’s edge, you may wish to exclude the hospital from the analysis so that your visitation results reflect town centre visitors, and not the hospital visitors.Our Help Centre also includes articles on how to request a custom location or choose the best comparison locations.

Our data system is often used in this way by teams like yours. The type of outcome you get, and how you set up your project really depends on the type of project (ie small streetscape change vs large park upgrade), as well as type of impact you expect to see (ie; visitation patterns to change, or more weekend activity etc)The Use Cases section of our Resource Base provides some great examples of how other Councils have used our tools. You're also welcome to book in a time to speak with one of our Placemaking or Community Data experts to get some 1:1 guidance on using our tools for your use case

Our tools can be used to show the existing visitation patterns to those locations, as well as use our walkability analysis feature to look at the most important amenities adjacent to each location.For analysis that is specific to your locations you’ll need to set up a custom location with one of our Pro or Advanced seats. Our Help Centre includes some helpful resources on how to choose and set up custom locations.

There are three ways to access historical data in our tools:

1. Discover: All paid seats have access to historic behavioural data in our Discover tool, enabling you to check out monthly visitation, movement and activity hotspot data back to January 2023

2. Archive Reports: These reports are available as an 'Add On' to any paid account, and enable you to request a single historic month of your choice from our database.

3. Activity Trends Tool: This premium data add on can be added to any Insights Report, to show you the previous 13 months of activity levels across a location of your choosing.

I shared your questions/suggestions with the team. What came out of the discussion is that our analytics system is designed to match points of interest together and eliminate duplicates wherever possible. For example, you shouldn't get results for Joe's Pizza, and Joe's Pizza Cafe, if it is a single business that happens to use variations of its trading name.

That being said, we are very careful not to 'over-clean' the data. As our analytics are powered by crowdsourced data feeds (ie the community make our data as they use local neighbourhoods), sometimes the 'duplicates' are actually part of the insight. For example, a really popular pub may be mapped in our data as a pub, a beer garden, and a trivia room. Or over time a park - such as Hyde Park in Sydney - will show up as the park, the rose garden, the rotunda, and (maybe even) the public toilet.

Essentially if the place plays multiple roles in the community, and they are genuinely interacting with it in different ways, or under different names, then you may see a number of results in our data for a single place. In the example of  ‘Greenvale’ and ‘Greenvale Park’ that you raised, the place for 'Greenvale' is part of the Active Transit category, which indicates that it's referring to the skatepark within the park, whereas the place for 'Greenvale Park' is part of the Park or Reserve category, which indicates that it is referring to the actual park itself.