Sample Placecast Profiles output — synthetic.
PLACECAST
Placecast
Placecast is Motionworks' place-based population intelligence family. It measures who visits specific places, how often, how long they stay, and where they come from — for any point of interest in the Motionworks Places library, since January 2019.
Placecast™ Profiles delivers rolling weekly metrics for any place: visits, dropoffs, pass-bys, dwell time, visit frequency, unique persons, long-distance trip counts, and full demographic and home-location breakdowns. Data are published each Monday on a 15-day latency, making Profiles the right surface for current-state monitoring and trend analysis.
Placecast™ Select is the on-demand surface: users specify a place or place set and a custom time window — a single concert, a recurring farmers' market, a set of competitor locations over a quarter — and receive a complete activity profile for that exact scenario, back to 2019 at 15-day latency.
Supporting products extend the family into derived views: Placecast™ Trade Areas documents monthly home-location distributions by day type and day part; Placecast™ by Date provides hourly visit and occupancy curves for the average week of each month; Placecast™ Cohorts slices visits by user-defined population segments on the same hourly monthly grid; and Placecast™ Airport Enplanements provides validated monthly enplanement estimates for 303 US airports, calibrated to Bureau of Transportation Statistics benchmarks.
- Visit profiles + trade areas Data coverage
- Block group Resolution
- On-demand or by-date Availability
Products
Download a sample
Synthetic sample outputs to evaluate shape and structure. Each pair includes a tear sheet PDF and a data file.
Sample Placecast Select output — synthetic.
Who uses Placecast
- Retailers and restaurant brands use Profiles to track visitation trends, measure dwell time against benchmarks, and index their locations against competitor performance.
- OOH operators and media agencies use Trade Areas and Profiles to characterize the visiting audience for specific places and inform inventory valuation.
- Event organizers and venue operators use Select to produce audience profiles for specific events — concerts, sporting events, festivals — with precise date-and-time scoping.
- Tourism authorities and destination marketers use Profiles and Trade Areas to understand visitor origins, seasonality, and day-type patterns across destination geographies.
- Site selectors and real estate researchers use monthly by-Date trends to assess foot traffic history before committing to a location investment.
- Airport operators and airlines use Airport Enplanements for validated monthly passenger volume tracking, benchmarked against BTS data.
Data dimensions at a glance
| Dimension | Coverage |
|---|---|
| Geographic coverage | United States (Profiles, Select, by Date, Cohorts); US and Canada (Trade Areas) |
| Geographic resolution | Place-level; Trade Areas at Block Group and Dissemination Area (Canada) |
| Temporal coverage | January 2019 to present |
| Update cadence | Profiles: weekly (Mondays); by Date and Trade Areas: monthly; Select: on demand |
| Latency | Profiles and Select: 15-day; by Date and Trade Areas: 30-day |
| Delivery | Snowflake secure view |
Methodology summary
Placecast is built on the Motionworks Population Intelligence Platform — a quality-filtered monthly panel of opted-in mobile devices reweighted to full population scale. Visits and dropoffs are distinguished by place-type-calibrated dwell thresholds (maximum 15 minutes for Profiles). Demographic breakdowns are estimated at the household level, not the individual, using the neighborhood-typical household profile for each visiting block group. Confidence intervals accompany all visit estimates; imputation flags mark weeks where the standard rolling window is extended due to sparse data.
Full methodology → Methods: Population Intelligence
Validation
Placecast carries a dedicated validation product — Placecast™ Validation — that provides a confidence index score (1–5) for every place in every monthly release, based on audit status and eight discrete output checks comparing each place against its peer group. The most recent validation summary (v22) documents place-type-level accuracy rates across 45+ place types.
Jobs this family powers
- Place Analysis — Measure visit volume, dwell time, visitor origin, and demographic signature for any place or set of places. Profiles handles continuous monitoring; Select handles ad hoc scenarios; Trade Areas handles home-location mapping at monthly granularity.
- Audience Planning — Layer Placecast visitor profiles against Popcast cohort definitions to identify which audience segments over-index at specific locations or place types, informing both media placement and campaign targeting.