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 the standing activity profile for any place: visits, dropoffs, pass-bys, dwell time, visit frequency, unique persons, long-distance trip counts, and full demographic and home-location breakdowns, each as an annualized estimate over a trailing 12-month window. See Placecast Profiles for the publication schedule and release coverage; Profiles is 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: see Placecast Profiles for the publication schedule; by Date and Trade Areas: monthly; Select: on demand |
| Latency | Profiles: see Placecast Profiles; 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 scores every measured place against its peer-group benchmark each month on four dimensions (visits, dwell, hourly profile, and visitor footprint) using continuous 0–1 scores, where 0 means the place behaves as expected for its peer pool and values approaching 1 flag an outlier. 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.