Determining Point of Interest Visits From Location Data: A Technical Guide To Visit Attribution

A Technical application guide for determining POI visits. Learn how to use your GPS location data with POI geofences to determine if a device visited a place, brand, or type of store.

Understanding if a device visited a place, brand, or type of store can be valuable context to have for your business. Companies we currently work with use store visit information to build custom audiences for advertising purposes, to better attribute ad campaign spend, and to send contextual push-notifications in real-time.

Unfortunately, accurately determining if a device visited a place can be a tough engineering problem to solve. Dealing with messy GPS data, incomplete business listing information, and limitations in knowing where places exactly are located make visit attribution a complex problem. However, building a visit attribution solution remains a worthwhile endeavor since it enables you to enrich digital data with physical-world context. Furthermore, building a visit attribution solution in-house allows you to tune the algorithm to your specific input data and specific use case which results in a better end solution for your customers.

Luckily, with SafeGraph Places, it becomes easier than ever to build your own robust visit attribution algorithm in-house.

In this whitepaper, learn about initial approaches taken to do visit attribution as well as potential drawbacks of these approaches. Then, learn about our current state-of-the-art visit attribution algorithm powered by SafeGraph Places.