Compare
Advan Research vs RS Metrics
Both estimate real-world physical activity outside company disclosures, but from different sensors — mobile location pings versus satellite imagery.
Side by side
| Advan Research | RS Metrics | |
|---|---|---|
| Vendor | Advan Research | RS Metrics |
| Pricing model | Quote only | Quote only |
| Free tier | No | No |
| Deployment | Cloud | Cloud |
| Open source | No | No |
| Best for | Investors estimating retail foot traffic and same-store sales from mobile location data | Commodities and equity investors wanting satellite-based physical activity estimates |
| Pricing | Custom institutional data licensing; not published on the website. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. | Custom institutional data licensing; not published on the website. Pricing has not been verified yet — see the vendor's site. |
| Features |
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Verdict
Advan Research and RS Metrics both sell an independent read on physical-world activity, which is what puts them in the same shortlist — but they collect it with different sensors, so they cover different kinds of questions. Advan works from anonymized mobile device location pings, which makes it strong on human foot traffic: store visits, dwell time, and which other brands the same visitors go to. RS Metrics works from satellite and aerial imagery analyzed with computer vision, which makes it strong on things a phone in someone's pocket can't see: stockpile volumes, construction progress, industrial and land-use activity.
Choose Advan Research if
- Your question is about consumer foot traffic — store visits, mall traffic, or cross-shopping between competing retail brands — as a same-store-sales proxy.
- You want visit-level and dwell-time granularity, not just an aggregate activity index.
- The company you're researching depends on people physically walking into a location.
Choose RS Metrics if
- Your question is about a physical asset that doesn't depend on human foot traffic — a mine, a metal stockpile, a construction site, a retail parking lot as a volume proxy.
- You cover commodities, industrials or ESG-adjacent metrics like land use and emissions-relevant activity, where satellite imagery is often the only independent external signal available.
- You need a read on a company's own or a competitor's facility that doesn't rely on people opting into location tracking.
The honest caveat
Both are quote-only institutional products with no public pricing, and both feed into the same kind of investment thesis — a leading, independent check on a company's real-world activity ahead of disclosure. Neither is a substitute for the other: a retailer's parking-lot traffic (RS Metrics) and the same retailer's actual customer visit and cross-shop pattern (Advan Research) answer related but different questions, and funds covering consumer retail names often end up wanting both. See fundamental analysis for how alternative data typically slots into a broader research process, and choosing an alternative data provider for how the rest of the category compares.
Last reviewed September 22, 2026