Retail Grand Openings Fizzle If Same-Brand Locations Are Too Close
The ramp up of store traffic for new Big Box and Dollar Stores was over twice as fast when first in the county. When it comes to navigating and understanding the strategy behind new store openings, customers can leverage data from Precisely PlaceIQ. In any given region, this data helps businesses understand foot traffic to […]
Big Box Store Grand Openings Can Boost Visitation to Nearby Stores by 20%
A new store opening can have a major impact on visitation behaviors in the area, we looked at how quickly a newly opened store gained traffic, in relation to its distance from the closest location of the same brand. When there was no nearby existing location, the store saw a rapid increase in traffic, versus […]
Black Friday Spending Gains Far Outpaced Visitation Increases
In 2022, Black Friday spending increases across retail far surpassed visitation increases. When analyzing this major shopping holiday with data from PlaceIQ, we can see larger basket sizes, higher in-store conversion rates, and pent–up demand for savings drove these spikes. Visitation + Purchase + Demographics: Expanding our view on the post-pandemic Black Friday Black Friday […]
One Stop Shopping Trips are Gaining Popularity
On average, Big Box and wholesale Warehouse Clubs see a 16% higher bump in spend during the core back-to-school period compared to apparel and clothing stores. With a post-pandemic prime shopping period behind us, we wanted to investigate consumer spending habits, considering the context of reemergence and macroeconomic factors. With the knowledge that people pulled […]
The Return to the Office is in Progress: Traffic to Workplaces is Up 30% Since January
While the debate between remote, on-site, and hybrid work continues to bubble, visitation to offices is steadily tracking upwards. There’s been a lot of discussion these past few months about the return to the office, working from home, and hybrid scenarios. We’ve read arguments for one way or the other, but the facts on the […]
Commuters are Returning to the Office as Spending Surges at Business Apparel Retailers
Consumers seem to be pulling back on spending, but the return to pre-pandemic behaviors is generating bright spots of demand. One example is surging foot traffic and spending at clothing retailers focused on workplace attire, driven by people equipping themselves for a return to the office. In our last update, we illustrated how spending is down […]
Visits Are Up, But Spending is Down as Consumers Budget for Gas
The pandemic isn’t over, but social distancing is no longer the main driver of consumer behavioral change in our data. Higher prices, especially at the pump, are driving down spending in nearly every vertical, despite COVID-weary consumers’ desire to get out of the home. Visits are healthy and travel and entertainment venues are steady. While […]
Social Distance Tracker: Traffic Patterns Indicate Consumer Enthusiasm is Returning
Where we sit – in New York and the San Francisco Bay Area – cases are coming down fast. Hope is on the horizon and it looks like the pattern we watched in South Africa and the UK will play out here: Omicron will spike COVID case counts like never before before leaving as fast as […]
A Big Milestone on the PlaceIQ Journey – We’ve agreed to be acquired by Precisely
When we sat down at my kitchen table in Boulder, CO over ten years ago and decided to take the plunge and commit to building the business that was to become PlaceIQ – we had no idea of the adventure and journey that would unfold. We couldn’t have known we would end up creating a new […]
How to Solve Non-Serializable Errors When Instantiating Objects In Spark UDFs
Here at the PlaceIQ we have beautiful intelligent engineers for days. DAYS. A lot of what they do is locked away in Java and left as a mystery to the common man. Sometimes they write in Pig, because that is just life and sometimes in life you have to write jobs in Pig. There is […]
Segmenting the US with Observation-Weighted K-means Clustering
The setup: using location data to segment regions At Precisely we build location analytics products based on data from hundreds of millions of devices across the US. Intuitively, we know there is value in breaking down a nationwide dataset to look at regional trends–some of our clients are regional brands; some behavior patterns trend regionally; […]
Big Data Lean Architecture
Big data has helped us in solving some very sophisticated engineering problems. But in turn, as those who work with complex data know, it also creates architectural challenges. At PlaceIQ, it’s critical that we properly orchestrate the big data technologies that are available in order to maintain, and optimize, the high scale dataset we manage. […]