What would have caused the home panel to show a big increase in number of devices residing over the past 2 months?

Anyone know what would have caused the home panel to show a big increase in number of devices residing over the past 2 months? Given we use this to normalize visitors over time it did show a substantial drop in visitors in November/December as well.


This topic was automatically generated from Slack. You can find the original thread here.

Hi @Philip_Baer - thanks for reaching out, and apologies for the delay (today is a holiday for the SafeGraph team). The increase in SafeGraph’s Patterns panel starting 11/15/2021 is a known data issue (read more here). Let me check with our team on why, and I’ll circle back with you. May not hear back until later tomorrow when most of our team members are back in the office.

Thanks, appreciate the info and update!

Some more info, as that link says not much to do. But clearly something seems off - here I look at Grocery Stores and last two months shows big drops in scaled visitors (where I normalize) - but the raw visitor count is up slightly.

This is really helpful. Thanks for sharing, Philip. Circulating this to our team!

Hey @Philip_Baer - haven’t forgotten about this. Just wanted to close the loop. I know your CSM, @Steve_Lee , has already reached out to your team, too. We’ve had some internal meetings on our end to discuss best ways to approach this.

Our high level recommendation is to normalize using the normalization stats file as we have found that normalizing at the CBG level has created issues for others in the past and the normalizing at the region level has been sufficient for most use cases.

If you are normalizing at the CBG level, we can work together on more of a custom solution to this issue. If this is something that you want more information on, please feel free to flag that with Steve.

To prevent you from being passed around on our side, I’ll go ahead and pass you off to @Steve_Lee so you can connect directly with our Product and Customer Success team, if needed.

However, please do not hesitate to reach out if I can help with anything related to the SafeGraph Community.

Ok. I will have to look at what difference is with using normalization stats. Currently using home panel summary, at the state (region) level, not CBG. I sum up all devices seen for a given month. We use the monthly core poi patterns file so its a nice 1-1 match (on state and month).

@Philip_Baer feel free to let us know updates on your end with our current email thread and we can continue the conversation there!

Sounds good - thanks!