Geofencing vs building matching

Geofencing (on the left) is a commonly used technique to estimate foot traffic. For a building, billboard or other location, a circle is drawn with a radius of typically 50-100m. Every enter or exit event - whenever a smartphone enters or exists the geofence - is counted as an interaction. People passing by the crossroad nearby are counted equally for people having actually visited the location. 

Building matching (on the right) or route mapping of the taken route based on a combination of coordinates provides an alternative and more accurate approach to define visits or “interactions”. In this case, smart algorithms define the visit probability based on all coordinates, the building shape or the orientation of a billboard, the travel direction, the dwell time of the visit (time between coordinates), the speed of travel, opening hours, the time of day, the transport mode etc. 

The picture below illustrates how this works in practice.