How to Evaluate Location Analytics Data

Earlier this year, Oxfordshire County Council withdrew footfall data supplied by Huq Industries from its public monitoring reports. Figures the Council published in good faith in December 2025 were found to contain anomalies when compared against other data sources in January 2026. Huq identified the cause as a dataset rebalancing that had inflated figures in densely populated urban areas, and have since announced plans to significantly increase their data panel.

The industry conversation has focused on accuracy — but that misses the bigger picture. There are five questions beneath that conversation that are worth asking — not just of any one provider, but of any data supply chain.

1. How would you know if your data was wrong?
   The Oxford anomalies came to light in January 2026, when the council compared the figures against other data sources that had just become available. The data had already been published the previous month.
   If you rely on third-party footfall or mobility data, ask yourself honestly: how confident are you that anomalies would be caught before they reach your dashboard — and your board report? And if they were found, what is the process for notifying you and reviewing any affected outputs?
2. Is more data actually the answer?
   The proposed response to the Oxford situation includes significantly increasing data panel size. More data can certainly add resilience. But Oxford is one of the busiest city centres in the UK — it was never short of data.
   The root cause identified was a methodology change, not a data volume problem. More data, processed through the same methodology, doesn’t resolve a methodology question — the two need to be addressed separately.
3. What does your provider actually validate against?
   Claims of accuracy are easy to make. What matters is what a provider validates their model against in practice: static footfall counters, car parking data, event attendance records, retail performance indicators, seasonal baselines developed over time.
   Ask your provider to explain their validation process — not the brochure version, but the working one. A clear, specific answer to that question is a strong signal of a well-built, well-maintained system.
4. How stable is the data over time?
   Retrospective adjustments that affect twelve months of trend data have knock-on effects beyond the numbers themselves. Every report, funding application, and board presentation that drew on those figures is also affected — along with the credibility of the people who presented them.
   Stability matters as much as accuracy. A consistent, validated dataset that you can rely on month after month has a practical value that goes beyond any point-in-time precision metric. Look for a provider whose historical figures do not change retrospectively without clear explanation — and whose methodology updates are validated before they reach your reports, not after.
5. Are you asking the right question in the first place?
   Even a perfectly accurate footfall figure tells you how many people came. It does not tell you who they were, why they came, what they did, how long they stayed, or whether they are likely to return.
   The Oxford situation is a useful prompt to revisit not just how footfall is measured, but what it is actually being used for — and whether there is a more useful question to be asking. Who came, where did they travel from, how long did they stay, what did they spend, and are they likely to return? Those are the questions that drive real decisions about location management, investment, and regeneration. Footfall counts bodies. It doesn’t understand them.

A Straightforward Conversation

If any of these questions have prompted a conversation worth having — about your data supply chain, your analytics approach, or what your location data is actually telling you — we’d welcome the conversation. At Place Informatics, Place360 brings together footfall, movement, spend, and persona intelligence so decision makers can move from counting people to understanding them.

Read more:

• Oxford’s Withdrawal of Huq Data
• Why Footfall Alone Is Not Enough

Place Informatics provides place analytics, footfall intelligence, and behavioural insights for UK town centres, BIDs, local authorities, national parks, and tourism destinations.