Travel Survey

At the heart of Route is a three part travel survey. This is recruited face to face and managed by Ipsos Mori. which gives us the information we need to understand people’s travel habits and the posters and screens which they are exposed to.

Each year 7,200 adults aged 15+ participate in the research. These people are selected on the basis of their demographic and geographic distribution to ensure that annually our sample reflects the GB population.

The research task can be split out into three phases:

  1. Demographic screening and recruitment

  2. Passive Multi-Sensor Tracking

  3. Lifestyle questionnaire

The passive tracking element of Route allows us to follow our participants for a period of two weeks. To do this, we issue participants with a ‘Multi-Sensor Tracking device’ which captures the precise location of the device on a second by second basis using an advanced GPS chip. The device also makes use of additional sensors such as an Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Magnetometer and Barometer to inform on participant movements even when the GPS signal is less accurate, such as indoor or underground locations.

Every journey that participants make is recorded which gives us crucial information on the exposures they have to out of home advertising. We use this data to help construct our key audience measures. These journey traces determine not just how many ads people are exposed to, but for how long, and where they are positioned relative to the ads in order to calculate the probability that the ad will be seen.

Travel survey data is rolled up to provide a critical mass of information which is sufficiently robust for us to report on all GB inventory. In practice this means collating data from multiple years’ sample. Typically this spans a three year period and the sample is refreshed on an annual basis whereby the oldest year’s data is removed and the newest available sample is introduced. This typically gives a reporting sample in the region of 21,000 people’s journeys.

At present Route data is based on data collected between September 2016 and February 2020 and includes data from 25,447 people.

Further Reading

Questionnaire - Demographic Recruitment Questionnaire

Questionnaire - Self Completion Lifestyle Questionnaire