How to: Use location data to uncover the consumer visitation journey

Where your users come from matters.

Introduction

It’s about the journey, not the destination. At least, that’s what businesses are thinking when they look to understand the consumer visitation journey, which highlights a consumer’s real-world path before and after visiting a given brand. These insights are valuable in helping entprises and brands build relevant messaging to reach key audiences, uncover partnership opportunities, benchmark against the competition, and prioritize new store locations.

To better help businesses tackle such tasks, Foursquare created a Consumer Journey Matrix methodology that exposes what stops visitors made directly before and after visiting a specific brand, as well as two stops before and two stops after.

What is a Consumer Journey Matrix?

The Consumer Journey Matrix is based on a transition matrix, a mathematical model that summarizes the probabilities of users transitioning from one state to another within a system. Foursquare applies this model to consumer visitation observed through our first-party, always-on foot traffic panel to summarize the most common visitation journeys to/from a given brand.

How does it work?

A typical transition matrix will describe only one memoryless transition (for example, a visit to a quick-service restaurant (QSR) after a visit to a gas station) without considering steps occurring before or after each transition. To help advertisers uncover a more complete understanding of the consumer visitation journey, our Consumer Journey Matrix focuses on one chain/category, tracking the consumer across two transitions before and after the focus chain/category visit (for example, work to shop to QSR to gas station to home).

Additionally, we apply age-, gender-, and geographic-based normalization to each transition to mitigate biases inherent in visitation data collected using a first-party panel of consumers.

Consumer Journey Matrices can also be compared over time and across consumer segments in order to add another layer of insights. For example, looking at the Consumer Journey Matrix quarter over quarter can help marketers understand shifts in the consumer visitation journey throughout the year.

Results

Through our Consumer Journey Matrix methodology, we were able to validate a QSR’s hypothesis that the share of their visits coming directly from consumers’ workplaces had decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. Additionally, now that shoppers are more likely to combine trips in order to tackle all of their errands at once, it’s more likely that they will be visiting the focus QSR during a shopping trip. Using this information, the QSR may adjust their messaging to highlight this specific need state, or perhaps open new locations closer to shopping areas rather than office parks.

The key takeaway

Robust visitation journey insights are pivotal to understanding how your

brand fits into consumers’ lives. Forming a fuller picture of consumers’ real-world paths using Foursquare’s Consumer Journey Matrix can help

businesses connect more deeply with their key audiences and make pivotal business decisions.

Interested in learning more about Consumer Journey Matrices or how location data can bring value to your business? Contact us at Foursquare.com.

Foursquare is the leading independent location technology company, powered by our deep understanding of how people move throughout the world. Our solutions help businesses make smarter decisions, developers create more engaging experiences, and brands build more effective marketing strategies.

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