Polygon data: What it is and how can it be used?

Imagine a hungry and pressed customer is visiting a store next to your food outlet, and you send them a message saying, “Hey, Daria. What are you still thinking about? Come in and enjoy the deliciously cheesy Pizza at 50% with code EATS. See you soon!”

The probability of this customer visiting your store is still higher despite being in a hurry. Why? Because 1) the offer is enticing, 2) the offer kills their hunger pangs, and most importantly, 3) the location is quite close by to avail the offer. Irrespective of how attractive the offer is, you lose a customer if the location would have been far away. This is the importance of location-based marketing.

Gone are the days of spray-and-pray advertising; marketers now are constantly looking for real-world insights to target audiences based on their behavior, interests, and traffic. Polygon data, an important metric in location-based marketing, is a powerful parameter that helps marketers and advertisers to leverage the user’s location for various purposes.

What is Polygon Data?

In simple words, it is a virtual boundary/perimeter of a location that can be a house, a store, or a building or area that can be spread out to a few miles. Polygon is a term that can be used in many different contexts. Still, the most popular one is its ability to detect a phone entering the area and triggering the alerts either within the device itself or around the external environment.

The polygons of buildings and interior spaces include geocoding details like latitudes & longitudes. Polygons can be created for stores within a venue, airports, malls, parking lots, etc., and the output can be delivered in the form of a text file, Geojson, or Shapefile.

Using polygon data, businesses can collect insights about customers or competitors around the location or send push notifications, ads, text message alerts to the customers and promotes the brand.

3 Usecases of Polygon Data

Geomarketing and Advertising

Polygon data helps you identify the exact location and thus promotes sales via discounts and coupons. Geofence can be created around a store, and app-based push notifications, SMS, or emails can be sent to the user’s mobile device whenever it crosses a marked store. For example, below is a polygon screenshot of “McAlister’s Deli” restaurant in Minnesota, U.S., along with the entry point captured by Xtract.io.

Creating personalized prompts about your products or services drives users to visit the store. In a survey, 71% of people preferred a personalized ad experience. For example, the Sephora brand sends out a push notification when a user is within the radius of its nearby store. This geo-triggered notification improves the user opt-in rates and is a win-win strategy for both the consumer (free make-over) and the advertiser (one new customer in-store). Leveraging polygon data helps businesses to increase their sales, growth, and engagement with their customers.

Businesses can also target their customers at various locations such as airports, events, trade shows, or even administrative boundaries. According to a survey by App Annie, an individual's global average time spent on the phone is 4.2 hours a day, up by 30% compared to two years prior. As a result, tracking the location of users is a booming metric for marketers and advertisers.

Seamless Indoor Mapping

Luckily, the world has slowly moved away from the “lockdown life” and started adapting to the “new normal,” which includes opening stores, expanding new business locations, shifting of locations, etc. Indoor mapping helps in the visualization of a place within a venue. Accurate polygon data aids in better decision-making, thereby improving operational efficiency and customer service. Here’s a polygon captured by Xtract.io, which indicates a “Wingstop” restaurant located within “Pleasant Groove Shopping Center, Texas, U.S.”

Identifying areas that are most likely to thrive is a common question in every business strategy. Polygon data answers this question. Along with other data types such as food traffic data, polygons indicate the most popular and growing location or store in the neighborhood. These polygon data help industries across various sectors. For example, the travel & hotel industry can use this data to help travelers with local sightseeing spots, ATMs, hospitals, etc. Similarly, government and public transit systems can leverage the benefits of polygon data in scenarios of downtime, disaster, traffic, roadblocks, etc.

Identifying areas that are most likely to thrive is a common question in every business strategy. Polygon data answers this question. Along with other data types such as food traffic data, polygons indicate the most popular and growing location or store in the neighborhood. This polygon data help industries across various sectors. For example, the travel & hotel industry can use this data to help travelers with local sightseeing spots, ATMs, hospitals, etc. Similarly, government and public transit systems can leverage the benefits of polygon data in scenarios of downtime, disaster, traffic, roadblocks, etc.

Mobility Analysis

According to the Statista report, 30% stated that they were "very excited" about going out and dining in a restaurant post-pandemic, and only 6% expressed "no excitement" for the same. This study makes the food & dining industry benefit from polygons as it shall measure the foot traffic across the chains and outlets, the dwell time, customer’s purchase history, etc. Based on the metrics received, customer behavior, patterns, footfall around the store can be identified. The additional workforce could be added in the stores with high footfall, while new marketing strategies can be devised with chains with low footfall. This powerful marketing tool is needed in today’s marketing strategies to connect the dots between the customer and a brand and provide a better user experience to the customers.

Polygon data also allows companies to analyze and understand their competitor’s position in the market to effectively forecast and strategize their operational plans. Companies scouting to expand their physical operations in a new place can leverage the advantages of polygon data as it can show the location, size, dimension, latitude, longitude of the place without even being present in the region physically.

At Xtract.io, a repository of 3 million polygons across 3000+ chains in the US exists. Additionally, off-the-shelf and on-demand polygon data can also be delivered. Do you want to get a glimpse of our polygon data? Book now for a free personalized demo.