Check out some commonly asked questions regarding Zartico's data and processes!
FAQ Sections:
- FAQs on Geolocation Data
- FAQs on Visitor Spending Data
- FAQs on Event Data
- FAQs on Website Contribution Data
- General FAQs
Geolocation FAQs
How does Zartico’s mobile location data work?
Our location data provider provides us with a daily flow of raw data from people’s devices (such as mobile phones). We ingest this data identifying visitors vs residents, where visitors have come from outside your destination, where they go while they are in your destination, and how long they stay.
Details: We design a place-based strategy for interpreting location data of both visitors and residents in your destination. The one constant for any destination is the physical places people come to explore and experience as a visitor. So we take those physical places and interpret them digitally, like a map, so location data can be understood through them. This gives us a clearer view of how visitors travel around from place to place. We ingest location data every single day, and this data registers someone’s location by where their device, such as a phone, is at any given moment throughout a day using GPS coordinates. These coordinates are shared through the mobile apps users have opted-in on their personal device. We then take this data and filter it through the map of places and areas in your destination.
Does Zartico ingest any personally identifiable information?
No, our privacy protection policy ensures we do not see any personally identifiable information whatsoever. All data is anonymized and absent of any trackable information. Even the device ID is anonymized before Zartico receives the data.
Details: Zartico and our data partners are committed to transparency and protecting the privacy and personal information of individuals. See the privacy statements of our geolocation and spending partners for additional information.
How does Zartico qualify a device as a visitor? How do you know the tracked devices are visitors vs. residents (or commuters)?
From the abundance of data we get on each device, we set very specific criteria that allow us to exclude residents from who we identify as a visitor.
Details: Using our geolocation data, we are able to determine where devices (such as a mobile phone) are usually located in the middle of the night, known as it's common location. This provides an indicator of where the person who owns the device is from and where the device ‘sleeps’. We filter all the devices to find those found within your destination who are truly visitors. In order to count as a visitor from our Zartico methodology, a person has to travel outside of 50 miles from their home or work location, be within the destination boundary for more than 2 hours, and visit a place that you have designated as a tourism-related place of impact.
How many POI's do I get with Zartico?
With Zartico, you have unlimited access to our Place-Based Strategy. The number of primary places of impact is based on best practices to give you the best and clearest data for your destination. We will work with you to recommend the ideal amount based on your destination’s features and needs.
Details: With Zartico place-based strategy there’s no limit on POIs, or primary places of impact, you can designate within the Zartico application. We generate your list of POIs automatically based on our expertise and research. To strengthen the signal of visitation we receive, contextual POIs— things like chain restaurants, are also brought in by category. These become a filter for you to be able to watch more closely for visitation trends and to correlate with your other data. Taking into account your destination’s size and features, Zartico will generate this list of Primary POIs for you.
Is Zartico’s data strong enough in smaller rural destinations?
Our location data covers everywhere people go with their devices, such as mobile phones. If there are people moving around your destinations with a phone, we will get location data from a portion of them.
Details: Regardless of the size of your destination, our geolocation data provides valuable insights into the visitor flow for your visitor economy. We're able to provide the clearest view of your visitor economy by ensuring you have enough primary and contextual places of impact By being able to customize our approach to how we filter the geolocation data we get, which comes from mobile devices, we can build a precise grid for even rural locations. Plus, you get to designate the primary places you want to monitor. Also, the way our location data is captured means it works even when there is no cell coverage in an area. Our location data is captured as GPS coordinates and stored locally on the device, and sent from the device to our data provider when it is next within range. For example, if a visitor went to a popular hiking trail where there is no cell service, their coordinates during their trip would be captured and then sent to our data provider when they next returned to their hotel, to be counted in that location’s visitation.
Can Zartico allow me to POI something in a different state for competitive purposes?
It’s not recommended to POI a place outside of your destination’s boundary because of how it can affect your data, but we do have suggestions on how to think about comparisons of this kind and invite conversation around your unique needs.
Details: In order to keep your geolocation data in the Zartico application providing you with the clearest insights for your own destination, all places of impact must be within the boundary you establish for your destination. However, there are possibilities in how we approach benchmarking, comparisons, and specific places you want to look at more closely that you can discuss with your Client Experience Manager. Depending on your package, you will have an opportunity to work with your advisor on dynamic visualization that can include Places of Impact outside your destination boundary. These will not affect or be included in the data within your ZDOS.
How does Zartico’s 7 day processing period play into the date filter function that says 1 day ago… Is that really 8 days ago?
The date displayed in the Zartico application is the date the data is for. We take the raw data we receive and carefully analyze and check it before it is loaded into our application, and this happens over a rolling period of 7 days.
Details: When you see a date through the geolocation data in Zartico application, it relates to the date the location observation occurred. For example if someone went to a beach on a Saturday, the data will count as that Saturday’s date within the application. However, as data from the most recent 7 days is processed and checked, it will be added as additional data for those days. Once the date you are looking at is more than 7 days away from today’s date, the full data has been loaded.
What does the term “normalization” mean at Zartico?
Normalization means cleaning up the data and checking it for irregularities, so what you see in the Zartico application is trustworthy.
Details: Normalization is the standard process of processing and checking the raw location data we receive against several other data sources to make sure it is reliable before it gets loaded for you in the Zartico application. This also ensures when our data provider gains or loses a data source, you do not see an artificial spike or decline in your geolocation data.
Does Zartico use any correlation between the area code of the cellphone and their origin market?
We do not use area codes of cell phones as a measure of what origin market people come from, as we have other more reliable and precise ways to do so through our geolocation data.
Details: We determine someone’s origin market by what we know about their devices. Using our geolocation data, we are able to determine where devices (such as a mobile phone) are usually located in the middle of the night. This provides an indicator of where the person who owns the device is from, and is updated monthly for accuracy.
Spending Data FAQs
Where does Zartico get spending data from?
We receive the raw transactional data for domestic credit and debit spend, with daily granularity.
Details: Our spending data provides visibility into domestic transactions, with historical data going back to January 2019. Zartico is pulling spend from over 3000 financial institutions allowing us to currently see 90 million cards and growing, 1500+ brands, 3 years historical data, 10B + transactions annually. These include both debit cards and credit cards, of many types including Visa, Mastercard, and some American Express.
How is your spending data unique?
Our spend data is unique because it provides a great representative sample to see significant trends helping you understand how visitors spend money throughout your destination.
Details: Zartico provides the highest resolution and highest frequency spending data for both residents and visitors alike, giving destinations an even clearer view of their visitor economy, with a strong variety and sample size, with granularity down to the zip code level of who is spending what within your destination.
Event Data FAQs
How does Zartico get non-ticketed or privately ticketed event information?
Our event data partner, Predict HQ is able to provide us with a constant stream of event information coming from many sources, including ones where no tickets are publicly available.
Details: We get our event data from our partner, Predict HQ, who has access not only to ticketed events but also scrapes the internet for data on non-ticketed events as well, pulling in attendance for events with dates and venues listed to make sure you are aware of all kinds of events within your destination. Predict HQ is able to provide data from 300+ global event sources, for 40+ Million events worldwide, categorized into 28 event types.
Can Zartico add events to the Predict HQ data if they aren't in there?
Predict HQ data captures most events, but we also have the ability to submit additional events to be added to the event data.
Details: Our data provider provides us with constantly updated event data and attendance, but if you have a certain event not included, there is a form to submit to get an event added. You also can request a custom analysis for an event of this kind to bring all your data, such as spend, around this to provide the best insights for your destination.
Website Contribution Data FAQs
How exactly does Zartico’s Website Contribution work?
To be able to show you the correlation between who visits your website and then travels in-person to your destination, Website Contribution layers Zartico’s location data with your website data through our Integrated Data Model.
Details: Our Website Contribution data works by leveraging the location data from each electronic device, such as a phone or a computer interacting with your website. By identifying the device IDs of people having viewed your website, and the device IDs of people who have traveled to your destination, and comparing the two, we provide insight into how people from different origin markets are influenced by the various pages on your website to actually show up at your destination, and what timeframes are between when they view a page and when they travel to you. We do this by installing a pixel on your destination’s website designed to fire on every page and record the IP address for every device (such as a phone or computer). Broadly speaking, we then use data science to look for commonalities between these devices and the devices visiting your destination through location data. Because of the Zartico Integrated Data Model, we’re able to layer these two things together to show correlations between them. Having the ability to tie visitor movement within the community back to the website, tells a holistic story of the marketing and website contribution.
How granular can website contribution get? Can it tell me when visitors go to a specific POI recommended?
Because Zartico’s Website Contribution data comes in part through our geolocation data, it is able to go very granular, down to specific POI categories.
Details: From Website Contribution, you can tell when a person from a particular IP address (such as their home internet) visits a certain webpage within various content categories, such as outdoor recreation, and then travels to a place categorized as outdoor recreation, such as a park. Even if they visited the webpage on their computer and only brought their phone to the park with them, the device IP bridge allows us to determine understand these patterns.
General FAQs
How far back do you go with STR, Short Term, CC, Mobile, and Event Data?
The data Zartico provides goes back to January of 2021, but how far back any data we integrate from you will depend on other variables, such as when you set them up.
Details: Most data provided goes back to 2021, to allow for a long-term perspective on your visitor economy, including the ups and downs of the past two years. The exception is any data you have subscribed to or purchased to bring into the operating system, such as social media or lodging data, would then depend on your accounts with those data providers, but could go back up to two years.
How long is the implementation process?
In most cases, you will be able to see initial data insights within the first month. Your full operating system will be released within six to nine weeks.
Details: Implementation is a collaborative process, and it's where the partnership between Zartico and your organization truly begins! Your implementation specialist works with your team to ensure a frictionless setup process and will communicate the timelines and deliverables needed on your end to move most efficiently through implementation. To get your account and data connections set up, we will work with someone on your team to coordinate anything we need from you. This typically involves several steps: Getting a clear understanding of the unique goals and objectives you have as a destination so that we can tailor your insights to reflect these, working with you to confirm the primary places of Impact within your destination, setting up the data connections for data you bring in (such as lodging data or social media), presenting initial findings within the Zartico application, providing login access to your team, and creating a custom map analysis or dynamic visualization regarding a key question you have to help you achieve your strategic goals.
What is sample size and what does it mean?
In short, a sample size is a percentage that represents the whole. We routinely put our lives in the hands of sample sizes which account for less than .001% of the population. By comparison, modern geolocation data sets represent a sample approximately 5,000 times larger than the sample sizes routinely used in medicine and car crash testing.
Details: You may also wonder, Can I just multiply it by the right amount to get a pretty good idea on what my total visitor data would be?
We are frequently asked if we can estimate total visitor spending annually, the short answer is not quite. The data is representative and shows trends over time - does spending increase or decrease, what markets are spending the most in your destination, and what they are spending on by category. For legislative stakeholders these numbers are useful in terms of defining impact but won't be an estimate of total spending.
What we have done is added a sample Size calculator at the base of modules that include spending and location data to understand the sample size. Learn more abou that here.
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