TrafficMetrix®️ and you: your guide to getting the most value out of traffic data

We talk a lot at Kalibrate about how to turn insight into action. How to use information to fuel effective decision making. But there’s a step that needs to be taken before that, and that’s translating raw data into useful information. Turning data into insight is a critical consideration for professionals working in a number of industries.

They say data is the new gold, but you can only glean maximum value from it if you really understand how to read it.

To a certain extent, insight is in the eye of the beholder. One dataset can be put to use in multiple ways. It can tell different people different things, depending on what they want to learn from it.

So, how do you ensure you’re getting the most value from the information available? In this blog, we’ll discuss some of the ways in which customers across different industries use similar data types differently, to extract maximum value for their unique business and use traffic data strategically.

Combine traffic data with other datasets

Huge value can be found in combining traffic data with other datasets. One of the most effective examples we’ve seen of this is in retailers combining traffic counts with customer loyalty or customer transaction datasets, to get deeper customer insights.

By doing so, they gain an understanding of how much traffic they’re pulling off the road, and combined with flow data or geo-fencing data, they can start to understand how long customers are spending in store, or elsewhere. This shows not just when their peaks in demand are, but who’s coming to store when, and run promotions accordingly.

Slice similar datasets for different sectors

There are a number of ways in which traffic data can be used, and a lot of different businesses that need to use it. Retailers across all sectors need traffic data when determining where to place new sites for maximum customer volume and commercial impact. Out-of-home (OOH) advertisers use it to work out the best place to put billboards. Town planners use it to explore congestion hotspots and understand the impact of new construction on traffic flow. Traffic data is also especially important for hotels and those in hospitality. When combined with a view on local points of interest, it can give really clear insight into where best to place new sites. Looking forward, local governments may start to use traffic data to understand the impact of electric vehicles (EVs) on emissions, cross-referencing EVs sold with numbers of cars on the road, to understand how the carbon output in their area will change over time.

Bring data to life for maximum impact

Data visualization is a great way to quickly turn data into intelligence, and understand what your raw information is trying to tell you. Data visualization tools are quickly becoming more accessible, and with them, this tactic is becoming more attainable for businesses without a dedicated data science resource.

Once you have your traffic data in SHP, DBF, or CSV format, you can combine it with other datasets and create custom reports which quickly tell you the things that are important to your business. At Kalibrate, we also supply traffic data in PDF format with a radius map view, so it’s really easy to digest, and going forward, we’ll be plotting all our data points to an Open Street Map, so that users will be able analyze the data in more depth.

So, there are a number of businesses that can benefit from traffic intelligence, and a number of ways to use the data. But what should you be looking for in a data set in the first place?

Pinpoint accuracy: to guarantee that the information you’re basing decisions on is as accurate as possible, look for data suppliers that use actual recorded counts, rather than relying very heavily on modeling to supplement data sets. Bought and resold datasets are often incomplete, so by their nature, less accurate.

Consistent updates: frequent data refreshes — ideally automated —- will ensure you’re not relying on out of date data.

Complete coverage: you should look for data sets that offer real depth for your region, both in terms of historical data and full coverage of the locality. This is particularly important if you’re using the data to model predictions, because the more robust the data you have, the more reliable the forecasts.

At Kalibrate, we’ve been collecting traffic data for over 50 years. That wealth of longitudinal data means we have a vast library of raw information waiting to be explored, examined, and put to use in a number of ways, within a number of industries.

TrafficMetrix®️ from Kalibrate offers robust, accurate data to give you confidence in your decision making. Explore sample data for your area to see how you could use it.