What a panel measures
A foot-traffic panel observes a subset of mobile devices and infers visits. A published study covering 2018–2022 put SafeGraph's device sampling at 7.5%. Providers weight that sample back up to a population estimate.
Panels are excellent for questions about behaviour: who visits, how often, how long they stay, how that trends.
What routing measures
Routing computes which places can reach a store within a given drive time, using the road network. It says nothing about who chooses to visit. It says exactly who could, and it is deterministic — the same inputs produce the same answer every time.
Which to use
| Question | Right tool |
|---|---|
| How many people visited my competitor last month? | Panel |
| Is visitation trending up or down? | Panel |
| Where does this franchisee's protected territory end? | Routing |
| How many more units can this country hold? | Routing |
| How much of my catchment does a rival already cover? | Routing |
| Would this new store cannibalize the one down the road? | Routing |
Narrative Geo does not sample. Every trade area is routed on the actual road network with OSRM, against full Census/ACS population and a maintained POI set. The drive-time matrix is precomputed at 1.08 billion rows, so a national query across a 20,000-store chain returns in seconds rather than being metered per location.