Technical Forum

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.

Yes, there are two ways to do this:

1. The 'Residents out' tool within our movement data will show you which other suburbs local residents habitually visit. This will include trips for recreation, daily needs, as well as employment

2. The activity hotspots tool will show you which locations across a neighbourhood are busy, relative to one another. To do this, just make sure both locations of interest are captured within the same report (this can be done with a custom neighbourhood). It's important to note that the source data is unable to provide specific 'leakage' stats such as 100 people went to location X, but is very suitable for a relative busy-ness comparison.