The latest upgrade to Foursquare’s Best-In-Class Products. Home and Work Census Block Groups (CBGs) are now available for FSQ/Visits!
A Census Block Group is made up of approximately 600-3000 people, composed of a group of census blocks based on 2020 census data. CBGs are smaller than zip codes, providing a more granular understanding of where your customers live and work to inform business analysis and decisions, while being larger and more privacy friendly than individual census blocks. This new level of detail enhances our current categorization by zip code and allows you to layer an additional level of census data such as demographics onto the CBG attribute in order to learn more about visitors to categories, chains, and venues of interest.
How can CBGs help your business?
From site selection, to competitive analysis, to data enrichment and beyond, CBGs are useful for several analyses that can help your company out maneuver the competition:
1. Superior Site Selection
When analyzing locations for a new venue, it’s important to consider what other businesses are nearby and their visitor traffic patterns and demographics. With the addition of home and work CBGs, customers can layer additional census data with FSQ/Visits to help you develop an even deeper understanding of where these visitors live and work. This level of granularity provides deeper insight into the demographics of visitors in the area to confirm whether your target audience is already accustomed to traveling here.
2. Comprehensive Competitive Analysis
With access to CBG data, you are able to develop an understanding of where visitors in competing locations live and work, the demographic makeup of these CBGs, and how far customers are willing to travel to visit similar venues. Armed with such insights, you can capitalize on what works (or doesn’t!) for your competition in order to appeal to the right audience and increase customer share.
3. Detailed Data Enrichment
With access to CBGs, you can enrich your in-house consumer data to build even more visibility into where your customers live and work, thereby allowing for more holistic customer profiles and granular customer segments to support marketing and campaign targeting efforts.
User privacy remains our priority
Protecting user privacy is a top priority for Foursquare, and we never sacrifice the privacy of users for data accuracy. While CBGs are able to provide a more granular understanding of where your customers live and work when compared to zip codes, CBGs are larger and more privacy-friendly than individual Census Blocks.
Below are a few more details about how we prioritize privacy:
- We do not provide census blocks, but rather Census Block Groups which represent aggregate census blocks that include no less than 600 people
- We obfuscate the exact time of all visits
- We filter out visits to users’ home and work locations
- We do not include the inferred home zip code if that zip code has less than 600 people
Effective immediately, all Visits data deliveries will include home and work CBGs with historical coverage expected in early 2022.
We are continually improving and adding features to FSQ Visits. Stay tuned as we announce more features soon!
To learn more about this feature release, reach out using the form below.
