Category: Location

Relative position

The position of one object in relation to another.

Relative positional accuracy

The degree to which the relative position of two objects agrees with their true or expected relative position.

Remote sensing

The acquisition of information about an object or phenomenon without being in direct contact with it.

Resolution

The smallest distance between two distinct objects that can be resolved by a given sensing system.

Retail Foot Traffic

Retail foot traffic is the number of people visiting a physical retail location over a defined period. It is the offline equivalent of website traffic: a measure of how many people a store actually reaches, and the denominator behind conversion, dwell and catchment analysis.

How it is measured

There are three broad approaches, and they measure subtly different things.

  • Door counters and sensors — accurate for a single entrance, but blind to anything beyond it and costly to deploy across an estate.
  • Wi-Fi and Bluetooth sensing — wider coverage, but dependent on devices having radios enabled and increasingly limited by MAC address randomisation.
  • Anonymised mobile location data — measures a panel rather than everyone, then extrapolates. It works across any location without hardware, which is what makes competitor and market-wide benchmarking possible.

Visits are not the same as passers-by

A credible foot traffic figure applies a dwell-time threshold, so someone walking past is not counted as a visitor. It also depends on an accurate point of interest boundary: a polygon that overlaps a neighbouring unit or a car park will attribute visits that never happened.

What it is used for

Site selection and catchment analysis, benchmarking against competitors, measuring the impact of refits or openings, and attributing advertising to real-world visits.

Related: location data for retail and real estate.

Reverse geocode

The process of determining the street address or other geographical data associated with a given set of GPS coordinates.

Scale

The relationship between the size of an object on a map and the actual size of that object in the real world.

Scanned map

A map that has been digitized by scanning it with a high-resolution scanner.

Schema

A formal description of the structure of a database, typically expressed in terms of the relationships between different fields in the database.

Simple feature

A vector data type used to represent the geometry of a feature, consisting of a set of coordinates and optional attributes.