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FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

General

Who is Gravy?

Where people go and why tells the story of our world. Founded in 2011, Gravy Analytics is the enterprise location technology company providing actionable intelligence to businesses. Using its patented technology, the company brings data about people, places, and events together to understand human mobility, helping companies enhance their sales and marketing strategies and optimize business operations. Today, the company’s intelligence powers leading-edge solutions for a wide range of industries—from advertising to market research, financial services to supply chain risk management—that rely on knowing how people, products, and materials move throughout the world.

What is location intelligence?

Gravy uses pseudonymous mobile location data to gain insight into people movement patterns in the physical world. This data can be used to understand market trends, consumer behaviors, foot traffic patterns, and much more. We call this information location intelligence.

What is AdmitOne?

AdmitOne™ is Gravy’s location data processing engine. AdmitOne™ first filters out spoofed and fraudulent signals, then eliminates duplicates for a single source of truth. AdmitOne™ then matches validated signal data to points-of-interest – such as retail stores, restaurants, hotels and events – and applies proprietary analytics to confirm that each visit occurred before creating a verified visit.

What is a verified visit?

The foundation of Gravy’s business, a verified visit is a visit to a commercial place of interest that meets specific criteria and suggests that a commercial transaction occurred.

Why choose Gravy?

Gravy’s data co-op provides our customers with data for over 150M monthly mobile devices for incredible scale that is resilient to changes in universal location data supply. We also build our data products on 100% deterministic raw location data.

Gravy uses hand-drawn polygonal geo-fences for superior accuracy. This avoids issues associated with grid or centroid-based systems, which may erroneously capture some consumer visits while missing others.

Gravy maintains a database of over 1MM monthly events – both large and small. Events give context to consumer visits to multi-use venues and points-of-interest. (Consider a visit to Madison Square Garden: did the visit occur during a Disney On Ice show, or a P!nk concert? Is the visitor in-market for family fun, or pop music tickets?) This unique context isn’t available through other location intelligence providers.

Why are we called Gravy?

Gravy started as a local events discovery company – helping people find fun things to do. Today, events are what make us different, because they add context to our place and POI data. Now, most of us don’t go to events every day. But events – whether sports, music, family, or something else – are often what we’re most passionate about. Events make life that much more interesting – that much better. That’s where the name comes from. Gravy isn’t the main dish – it’s what tops it off and makes what’s on your plate even better.

What is the history of Gravy?

Gravy Analytics started in 2011 as a local events discovery company, recommending interesting things to do in your area. Knowing that events are often the greatest indicator of interests and passions, and seeing the gap in understanding what customers do in the physical world, in December 2016 we pivoted to become a location intelligence platform. Events – and the unique context that they add to location data – remain foundational to our business and are one of our biggest differentiators.

Data

How does Gravy obtain its location data?

Gravy operates a location data platform that aggregates data from multiple location data providers – representing over 150 million US mobile devices and millions more internationally.

Does Gravy have the right to use this data?

Yes, we have full rights to use this data. We abide by all applicable laws and regulations and hold consumer data privacy in high regard. 

All of Gravy’s data providers have warranted that the data they collect and provide to Gravy is done in accordance with all applicable laws.

Where does Gravy’s location data come from?

The data that we process is sourced by our partners via SDKs embedded within tens of thousands of apps. Gravy does not use bidstream data.

Does Gravy use data from wireless carriers or device manufacturers?

Gravy does not receive or process any location data from wireless carriers and/or device manufacturers.

Does Gravy use GPS data?

Yes. GPS is the method used by apps to collect location data in the foreground and background.

Does Gravy use IP address for location?

No. While Gravy does receive IP address information, IP-derived locations are too imprecise to be used in verified visits.

Privacy

Does Gravy track mobile devices?

No. Gravy does not universally track mobile devices. Gravy creates and maintains latitude/longitude-based geo-fences around commercial locations of interest (e.g. shopping, dining, hospitality, events, or points-of-interest) and captures visits to those places.

In addition, all Gravy products are built on aggregated data from multiple sources, location signals, and devices. Gravy applies its own privacy-enhancing technology, PrivacyCheck, to all of its products to ensure that any data generated by consumer mobile devices while visiting sensitive locations (like schools, healthcare facilities, and churches) is never used, shared, or resold.

Does Gravy know where devices are in real-time?

No. Gravy processes its location data with a 48- to 72-hour delay. No location data is received (or processed) in real-time.

What is Gravy’s Privacy Policy?

Our privacy policy can be found at https://gravyanalytics.com/privacy-policy/.

Consumer privacy is important to us. Read more about our privacy practices: https://gravyanalytics.com/consumer-privacy/.

Does Gravy let consumers opt-out?

Yes. Any consumer may opt-out of the inclusion of their data in our products at any time by completing our Mobile Advertising Opt-Out form.

Consumers have control over the location data they share and can reset their MAID on their device at any time. Or turn off location services within specific mobile applications or altogether.

Products

What products does Gravy offer?

Gravy has two lines of business. Data-as-a-Service, or DaaS, which provides location-based datasets and analytics for a variety of use cases, and Audiences, which let advertisers target engaged consumers with their advertising message.

What type of data does Gravy DaaS provide?

Gravy offers three core datasets built on pseudonymized mobile location data.

Observations – Foot traffic data for areas of interest globally. Understand human activity and people movement at locations around the world.

Visitations  – Verified foot traffic data contextualized with metadata for 1B+ monthly visits to commercial places and events across the U.S. 

Personas – Consumer personas built on the places and events that people visit in the real world. Enrich customer data or compare consumer behavior in different areas of the U.S.

Gravy also provides location analytics, available on-demand via API, including:

  • Area Visitors
  • Trade Area
  • Cross-Visitations 
  • Area Personas

Gravy offers a privacy-enhancing technology, PrivacyCheck, that enables organizations that work with location data to ensure that data generated by consumer mobile devices while visiting sensitive locations is never used, shared, or resold. PrivacyCheck is integrated directly into an organization’s tech stack to securely identify and remove location signals collected at sensitive locations.  No data is ever shared with Gravy. 

Which DaaS offering is right for me?

The right dataset or API to use will depend on your business objectives. If you want to analyze foot traffic data, for example, you’d likely want to purchase our Visitations dataset. If you want to append customer records in your CRM with behavioral information, you’d use our Personas API to do so.

If you’re not sure which dataset or API to use, that’s OK. We’ll work with you to understand your business needs and recommend the data set that’s right for you. Connect with a location intelligence expert now.

How is Gravy DaaS delivered?

Data delivery is flexible and based on client needs – batch delivery via S3 bucket or API. Due to the data storage requirements associated with many Gravy DaaS offerings, a data delivery consultation is included with all DaaS purchases.

How can I use Gravy DaaS?

Gravy’s data can be used to uncover many different insights. Some of our most popular analyses include:

Customer Insights – Definitive, privacy-friendly insights into your customer base. Includes buyer personas, loyalty metrics, brand affiliations, and place or event affinities.

Competitive Intelligence – Understand your competitors’ foot traffic and customer base. Compare consumer behavioral analytics across competitor brands and locations.

Supply Chain Analytics – Measure foot traffic activity at every entity in your supply chain. Understand site visits, unique visitors, dwell time, trade areas, and more.

Privacy Enhancements – Identify location data associated with privacy-sensitive locations in 1st or 3rd-party data to ensure that it is never used, shared, or resold. 

How can I visualize Gravy DaaS?

Gravy DaaS data files can be used with the analysis or visualization tools of your choice, such as Excel or Tableau. One caveat: you will want to be sure that your visualization tool is capable of handling the size of your data file.

What are Gravy Audiences?

Gravy Audiences are groups of mobile devices that behave similarly in the physical world. For example, devices frequently observed at shopping destinations might be classified as ‘Mall Lovers & Frequent Shoppers’. Devices observed at open houses might be added to a ‘Home Buyers’ audience. Or, devices frequently observed at airports and hotels on weekdays might be included in an audience of ‘Business Travelers’.

By using an audience, advertisers can more easily reach consumers who are likely to be interested in their product or service with a programmatic advertising campaign.

How many/what kinds of audiences does Gravy offer?

Gravy offers several thousand audiences today and adds new audiences every month.  Need help choosing the perfect audience? Gravy’s Audience Finder lets you sort and search by keyword to find the perfect audience for your next campaign.

Gravy also can build custom audiences to fit specific client needs.

How do I use a Gravy audience?

Gravy Audiences are available via several DMP and DSP partners, including MediaMath, Oracle, LiveRamp, and Lotame. For a full list of our DMP/DSP partners, visit the Gravy Audiences page.

What if my DMP/DSP doesn’t work with Gravy?

No problem! Gravy often makes our audiences available for use on platforms where we do not have a direct integration. Contact us for assistance.

Does Gravy offer a media component?

Gravy does not have a DSP platform to serve ad impressions which gives media buyers flexibility in campaign planning. Gravy is agnostic to the ad platform(s) that each client uses.

In cases where the client prefers to have Gravy manage an ad campaign for them, we do have partner DSPs through which we can deliver mobile and desktop ad campaigns using Gravy Audiences.

How much do your products cost?

Audience pricing varies by the audience, but generally ranges from $1-2.50 CPM. Check with your DMP/DSP for the most up-to-date pricing.

API access starts at $2K/mo. with a minimum 1-yr. commitment. The total cost of API access will depend on the nature of the project and the amount of data used.

All other DaaS projects are priced upon request. The total cost of the data service will depend on the volume of data requested and the length of the contract term. Visit our Pricing page for more information.

Are Gravy products available outside of the U.S.?

While Gravy collects location signals from all over the world (including Antarctica), we only maintain place and event data in the U.S. and Canada. Gravy’s Observations are available globally, but Visitations, Personas, Audiences, and other offerings reliant on verified visit data are only available for the U.S. and Canada.

Other

Can you help me find my phone?

No, we do not track individual phones. We use pseudonymized location data to build our Audience and DaaS offerings.

Do you support small businesses?

Our offerings are generally a better fit for mid-sized and enterprise organizations.

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