At the MRC Pontiac council of mayors meeting on Sept. 17, council approved a $30,960, two-year contract for the “Pro” version of Propulso, a data analytics service that will allow them to better quantify visits to local attractions.
MRC Pontiac socio-economic development coordinator Sabrina Ayers explained the service allows them to track how many people visited specific locations like the Chutes Coulonge or a section of the PPJ trail, based on cellphone user data.
“They have data that you can purchase reports to kind of see and kind of get an idea, are the attractions that we’re developing, are we getting lots of movement and action in those areas?” she said.
“What times of year do we see the most increases in movement? We can try and track and see more clearly [whether] the actions that we’ve been taking and the investments we’ve been making are actually building traction.”
On the company’s website, it states that the data it uses is collected with consent and is anonymized. It uses “GPS, Wifi, Bluetooth and IP positioning information to pinpoint locations with a very small margin of error.”
Its website boasts a wide range of insights that can be generated from its database, including demographic information such as age or income level, and even whether visitors to an attraction are locals or tourists.
Ayers said the service can be used retroactively, meaning the MRC can track visits to local tourist attractions going back several years, to evaluate past campaigns and provide a comparison for future initiatives. She said the MRC researched several different companies, but settled on Propulso due to the quality and granularity of its data.
“It will give us more solid, concrete numbers to work with,” she said.
