Frequently Asked Questions

Neighbourlytics is a simple community data platform, that provides place managers with unprecedented visibility into the community around your asset, every month.

Designed by placemakers for placemakers, our team have pioneered a powerful method of capturing real time data across local neighbourhoods to provide visibility into local lifestyle characteristics and trends.

With a focus on enabling stronger, more vibrant local communities, we are the first platform to build tools that are simple and intuitive for every day use. You don't need to be an analyst (or even love data) to get value from our platform.

By providing comprehensive insights into the lifestyle of local communities across Australia, Neighbourlytics equips place managers with the knowledge needed to understand neighbourhood dynamics, identify strengths and challenges, and engage effectively with stakeholders.

Whether managing urban spaces, planning events, or fostering economic development, Neighbourlytics' unique data tools enables place managers to make informed decisions that align with community needs and aspirations.

By leveraging our tools, place managers can optimise resource allocation, enhance community engagement strategies, and cultivate thriving, sustainable neighbourhoods that residents and businesses alike can thrive in.

Our tools cover the whole country (in fact, we are Australia's only lifestyle data tool that generates results for the whole country every month)

In our Discover tool you can see suburb level data results for every Australian suburb that has a residential population (and some that don't).

In addition to this, we provide detailed data results for 9,300 neighbourhoods across the country - one for every suburb with more than 500 unique visitors a month. The public locations are defined by our system as the 1km radius around the most amenity rich part of each suburb.

And if that doesn't cover what you need, all our paid seats now include the ability to set up a custom location of your definition.

Absolutely!

We offer a free account and trial access to our paid tools so you can explore all the features and benefits of our platform with no obligations. Sign up today to experience how our solutions can enhance your business operations and drive results.

If you have any questions or need assistance getting started, our dedicated team members are here to help. Feel free to book a call with us - we're eager to support you in your experience with Neighbourlytics

Although our tools are designed to be self-service, there are a number of ways we support our customers to make best use of our tools.

‍Resource base: You can access our online support material here, providing articles, FAQs, videos and other guidance on how to make best use of the tools. We are always updating this, so make sure you let us know if there's a topic we've missed!

‍By email: You'll receive tips and tricks via email once you create your account. These support emails will take you through key features and case studies, and link you to other great resources. You're also welcome to reply to any of these emails to get additional support from our team.

‍Speak to us: You can arrange a video call with our team at a time that suits you, or just call us directly on 1300 922 992.

In addition to this we can arrange tailored coaching or training for you or you team if you need some extra help. Just contact us to discuss your needs, and we can provide a quote to support you.

All accounts enjoy monthly data refreshes for 9,300 locations nationwide. Choose which access level suits your needs.

‍Starter is our Free account level. Starter enables you to get started fast with immediate access to nationwide lifestyle data. Typically used by newbies wanting to get comfortable with lifestyle data.

‍Pro is our entry level access for professional users. Pro seats include historic data, temporal analysis, download functionality and other tools. Typically used by professional place managers to support monthly place tracking

‍Advanced is our comprehensive access level. Advanced seats provide deeper functionality for all locations across Australia, most notably by providing nationwide access to our Explore tool.

Our free Starter account is pretty great, but if you want to see historic data, save more than 3 locations, or request custom boundaries or add ons, you'll want to join one of our paid plans.

Take a look at the plans and pricing options.

Data add ons are premium data tools that can be added to any report by request. Essentially, you make a request to add these tools on to any existing report saved in your library. Add ons include:

• Lifestyle Values
• Activity Trends
• Explorer

Sample data add ons can be viewed in any Insights Report, or contact us to learn more.

How to request a data add on

Data Add Ons” can be added to any report on a pay-as-you-go-basis on any paid account (Pro or Advanced).

To request an add on, save the location you require in our Insights Reports library. Then - using the 'Help' menu in the bottom right of the screen, open "Ask a question", and paste the URL of the selected report into the chat window, noting which Add On you would like to access.

Our team will then review the location to determine if high quality data can be provided, and provide you a quotation for the request.

Add ons are around $700 - $1,000 per report (+GST), but discounts are available if more than 1 location is needed.

Depending on the complexity of geography, Data Add Ons can typically be processed within 2 - 5 business days.

Take a look at our Purchasing Guide for more support.

On 1 July 2024 we updated our access bundles to make the process of buying and setting up simpler. 

Every new seat purchased - Pro or Advanced - now includes a custom location of your choice at no additional cost. 

Custom locations are now all refreshed monthly.

This means you can enjoy instant reporting for 9,300 public locations across Australia, AND lifestyle data tailored to your specific location of interest.

The prices quoted are for a single 'seats', meaning a single email address for annual or monthly billing cycles.

However if you'd like to share access with your colleagues, they can utilise our Starter seats at no cost.

We find that it's common for teams to start with one or two paid seats (Pro or Advanced) for regular users, and irregular users utilise the free Starter accounts. Starter users can easily upgrade at any time if they want the depth of tools in the paid accounts.

If you choose monthly billing, you can cancel anytime.

Contact us to cancel your account, and your cancellation will be processed within 24 hours.

You will then have access up until the end of your 'paid' calendar month period. For example, if your monthly billing was on 11 June, and you cancel on 20 June, you will retain access until 10 July.

We can provide you with an invoice for annual billing. To request an invoice please contact us, and we will arrange an invoice with 14 day terms.

Credit or debit card transactions are required to support monthly billing.

All new paid accounts now enable you to add a custom location boundary to your account. We encourage you to play around with the public locations first to check what is already available instantly, but if you still need a custom location then you can contact us to submit your request.

Once you have confirmed the location our system will process the data, and you will receive it within a few business days. If your request is urgent, then be sure to let us know.

Unfortunately you cannot set up a custom location while on a trial. But if you have questions around how they might work for your use case make sure you reach out as our team can help.

Yes, you can elect any shape or size when setting up a custom location.

When setting up a custom boundary you must be mindful of size constraints for optimal results.

Too small: Depending on your geographic area, boundaries smaller than 3km2 (2km2 in CBD locations) may yield limited data due to a smaller sample size, potentially affecting the robustness of your findings. Some of our data results have an error of up to 50m, so shapes that are too 'narrow' can be problematic.

Too large: Conversely, very large boundaries exceeding 15km2 might encompass diverse areas with varying visitation patterns, which could dilute the specificity of your analysis.

Our team can guide you on the best size and shape for your location to ensure that the data you gather remains informative and relevant to your exploration of local lifestyle dynamics.

Neighbourlytics have built a sophisticated data ingestion and processing system which creates unique geospatial data across Australia.

We are specialists in 'realtime lifestyle data'; essentially in measuring who the community is, what they value, and how they spend their time.

We do this by harnessing data that is created as people utilise local neighbourhoods. We have more than 15 data sources, and examples of the data sources that power our tools are:

• Mobile phone movement data: anonymised location data from 'app pings' enables us to plot the location of phones as people move through and around your location. This data is totally anonymised, there is no way for us to track an individual, or know who someone is. But by analysing the trends across a whole neighbourhood, we can show you the locations visitors come from, where is the busiest, and how the neighbourhood is different on different days or months.
• Open sourced maps: when you use online mapping systems, or tag a location in a social media app, you are helping to add information to a crowdsourced map. Essentially Google doesn't 'make' Google Maps, the map is built over time by the community using the neighbourhood and adding points of interest. We bring together many different crowdsourced maps, to build a comprehensive picture (in real time) of what exists in local neighbourhoods, and what places people interact with the most.
• Social media engagement and reviews: have you ever thought about the power of your post? Commonly people make social media comments, posts or reviews to show their support for a local place. Had a great time eating icecream on the foreshore: post a photo and tag the icecream shop. Really love your local cafe: leave a review so other people can find it. We track this digital engagement across local neighbourhoods to identify which places are the top performers, and how a place is evolving over time.

We've built our data system from 15+ raw data sources. To mitigate risks of supplier failure or bad data, we are supplier agnostic, meaning we are able to switch data suppliers without a large overhead. The only data set that we bring in that is unique (ie has only one supplier option), is the demographic data we bring in from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

We utilise commercial third party data providers for other data sources, such as chatter, places, movement, isochrones, maps, fine grain demographics. While there are numerous such data providers available on the market, we have undertaken extensive and careful review to select our primary providers based on their data availability, density, quality and integrity of collection and handling. It should also be noted that there are a number of redundancy suppliers also available if needed.

Our data often returns excellent results for regional towns and villages.

For privacy and data quality reasons there are some locations across Australia that we cannot generate results for, because there is simply not enough data available. However, these locations are less common than you might think. Not only because these smaller locations will often have stronger place attachment that their urban cousins, but also because we scale all our data results based on urban type.

This means that our place management tools are just as powerful in Eden as Mosman.

And if you're still not sure then just take a look! Create a free account to search for any Australian location, and select "save report". This will generate a lifestyle data report for last calendar month, showing you exactly was is available.

Yes, you can elect any shape or size when setting up a custom location.

When setting up a custom boundary you must be mindful of size constraints for optimal results.

Too small: Depending on your geographic area, boundaries smaller than 3km² (2km² in CBD locations) may yield limited data due to a smaller sample size, potentially affecting the robustness of your findings. Some of our data results have an error of up to 50m, so shapes that are too 'narrow' can be problematic.

‍Too large: Conversely, very large boundaries exceeding 15km² might encompass diverse areas with varying visitation patterns, which could dilute the specificity of your analysis.

Our team can guide you on the best size and shape for your location to ensure that the data you gather remains informative and relevant to your exploration of local lifestyle dynamics.

Data privacy is something that we take very seriously at Neighbourlytics. The first thing to note is that the data that we tap into is aggregated and anonymised - this means that it's not personally identifiable in any way.

What we're interested in understanding is the general herd level activity patterns of where people spend time, where they come to and where they go from, at a neighbourhood level, but there's no way that we can re-identify that information back to an individual.

Equally, when we're looking at lifestyle analysis and topic analysis, we use publicly available data from blogs, social media, ratings and reviews, to understand the key themes that are being posted about, such as picnics in the park, dog walking, local cafes, etc. We don't look at or attract any of the personal information or attributes attached to that data.

This makes Neighbourlytics a very safe data set to handle and analyse because we're looking at the top line trends that occur in a local area without handling any personal information.

It’s true that not everyone uses every social media platform, so we commonly get asked how we handle bias.

Top myths about social media bias

• Social media users are young: Not any more. Over 60s is the fastest growing group of social media users, and the average Facebook user is over 40. We have tested our data extensively in communities of older Australians, and there is no statistical drop off (in fact, it's very common to see the local RSL, or Bowls Club coming through as the most loved place - point proven!)
• Social media is only used for recreation:  If you think that social media is only used for sharing cat videos, or posting holiday snaps, then you're wrong! In Australia, more than 95% of businesses with an internet connection maintain an social media presence of some kind.
• Lots of people don't use the internet: Covid really changed this. The move to remote service provision and preference for digital transactions rapidly digitised our local economies. These days Australians spend an average of 6 hours and 14 minutes on the internet EVERY DAY.
• Whole segments of people - such as homeless communities, or CALD communities - do not use social media: Very untrue! Social media is an increasing channel of choice for many marginalised communities that may have once been seen as on the periphery of conventional communications. The peer-to-peer nature of these platforms commonly makes them more quickly trusted than traditional communication channels

How Neighbourlytics handles bias

It’s true that there are individuals in any demographic who are not online, but what’s not true is that there is one total vertical missing.

In fact, when looking into the demographic bias that comes with social media, the biggest skew is not 'who is online', but rather 'how do people engage with the platforms?'.

To generalise, younger people are found to check these platforms many times per day, moving across large quantities of content, but not interacting. While older people check less often, but for longer sessions and are more inclined to interact and leave comments.

For this reason, there are two key ways that Neighbourlytics reduce the bias of our data;

FIRST. We tap into multiple different types of data, from a number of different platforms, to ensure that we’re covering all kinds of different lifestyle behaviours.

For example if we only used reviews, it would skew 'older', or if we only used impressions, it would skew 'younger'. But by bringing in likes, checkins, reviews, posts, impressions etc... essentially all the digital activity that we can access, we are able to appropriately weight the results to reduce bias.

SECOND. We compute the whole country, every day. It is much easier to quality check and spot gaps or bias behaviours across large geographic areas, than if we were undertaking adhoc analysis.

This means we are regularly checking and adjusting our computations to make sure that we are identifying and handling biases appropriately.

While some social media monitoring tools track the activities of individuals to create consumer personas and behavioural predictions, we don't do this.

We take privacy seriously, and so our data is de-identified and focuses on places rather than the behaviour of individual people. This means we can't track what "types" of people are doing or saying things, but rather we aggregate information across a particular geography to tell you about the neighbourhood.

We don't capture any information about the individual people, and the 'only' information we know about them is that they were in the specified location, at a specified time.

While this means you can't use our data to track the behaviours of a specific demographic segment - ie where do young people spend time. However, this has a major upside. As we dont capture any information about individual people, our data is not sensitive to data breaches.

No, we do not track transit mode, routes or traffic/pedestrian counts. Our data system was created to provide insight into the unique lifestyle patterns of local neighbourhoods.

Rather than answering the question: 'how did people come to this location?' our platform will tell you 'why did people come to this location?'

While our tools don't provide classic movement data, we do have nationwide data available that shows:

• origin suburbs: the home location of visitors to your focus area
• destination suburbs: the suburbs which residents of a location travel to
• typical travel distances: of all trips across a location, what is the average length, and how is this changing, or different to other places?
• activity hotspots: the relative levels of activity across a neighbourhood, including daytime, night time, weekend, weekday
• walking and driving catchment analysis - plot walking or driving isochrones to learn the accessibility to any location.

No, in most circumstances users are not able to specify the date ranges of your reports.

‍Why not?

‍Having spent 7+ years defining a reliable, stable lifestyle data system, we have fixed our data results to a calendar month for a few reasons:

• to mitigate the 'irrelevance' of external variables to your results. If you isolate a few days, your lifestyle results may be unreasonably skewed by bad weather, or a change to traffic conditions, or even a noisy busker
• to ensure an ample sample size for any location. This maximises our data coverage across the country, and provides you with more comparison locations without worrying about data quality
• to enable temporal analysis. Our behavioural data can be spliced into day/night or weekend/weekday because monthly data provides ample data results.

If there is a specific reason you are interested in customising your dates, speak to us as there may be a workaround we can recommend.

Created by citymakers, for citymakers, our unique real-time data sets are used by anyone interested in place performance.

Typical questions answered include:

• Who are the important local stakeholders?
• Where do visitors come from?
• Where do people spend the most time?
• What local amenities does a neighbourhood offer?
• What does the neighbourhood offer at night, or on the weekends?

Our users include:

• Place managers
• Asset owners
• Traders & operators
• Local governments

See more use cases here

Our platform tools have been designed to provide you with monthly insight into:

• Who is the community?
• Where do they spend time?
• What do locals love and value?

Our most popular tools are:

• Activity hotspots - where do people spend time across the neighbourhood?
• Top attractions - why do people love to visit this location?
• Accessibility analysis - who can access this location within a short walk or drive?
• Visitation catchment - where did visitors come from last month?
• 24 hour economy - how is the amenity offer different at different times of the day or week?

If you have a specific question about how to use the tools, or a user case you're wondering about, then make sure you book a time to speak with us.

The way local people talk about their lives and what they choose to post online about their experiences is a key indicator of local values. By examining local chatter at a neighbourhood level it is possible to gain insight into how people love to socialise, where they love to spend time, and what activities they love to spend time doing.

Utilise Lifestyle Values to answer questions like:

• How do people love to spend their time?
• What activities do people value?
• How do people socially connect?
• What local places do people love?

Activity levels are determined by recording the total number of digital interactions within the neighbourhood over time. The higher levels of digital interactions correlate with visitation and use of the neighbourhood. This month-on-month analysis enables a visual depiction of how the activity profile changes across a year.

Leverage Activity Trends to answer questions like:

• How has activity changed since this time last year?
• What lifestyle categories are driving activity in a neighbourhood?
• Where are the opportunities to improve activation and increase visitation?
• Have physical changes to the precinct, activation or economic drivers altered activity levels?

Yes! It's really easy to share access to the data with others.

All public reports have a 'share' button at the top, providing a quick way for you to share the results with anyone else. Those viewers will need to create an account, however they can utilise our free Starter access level.

While you can also download data elements and reports with our paid accounts, we encourage you to 'share access' directly with other users so they can benefit from the interactivity of the data elements (ie zoom in on maps, hover over charts).

Yes, there are a number of different options for downloading the information to utilise it in a presentation or report, or save offline for historic reference.

What you can access depends on your access level. Starter accounts do not have access to the download function, but you are able to share content with others by:

• Share the reports digitally using the 'Share report' icon at the top of each report. This will provide a hyperlink to pass to others to view the reports digitally.
• Take screenshots of the tools using your computer's keyboard shortcuts
• Using your browser's print function, you may be able to "Print to PDF", which will generate a PDF based on the open screen.

CSV or high resolution image (Paid users)

All paid users can save data elements (maps and charts) as high quality PNG elements, and are also able to download Amenity and Stakeholder lists at CSV files. Select the 'download' button next to the object to download it.

PDF (Advanced Users)

Advanced users (and some custom reports) can also request a PDF download for any report. Unfortunately due to the size of the data, we haven't yet released the capability for you to download the report yourself from the browser (but we're working on it!).

Currently the best way to request a PDF is to:

• Navigate to the report & and copy the URL from the browser bar
• Open the "Help" icon in the bottom right of your screen
• Select "Ask a question" and past the URL link, and state that you are requesting a PDF.

Once we receive the request, our system will then generate the PDF and provide you with the PDF via email.