6 Technologies for powerful Trade Show Analytics

Whether you’re an individual exhibitor, sponsor, or trade association, you’ve probably considered some sort of technology for tracking traffic metrics at your trade shows. While in the past a couple staff members at the entrance to your booth or event with a clicker was seen as a great solution, innovation has once again made the practice obsolete (and for good reason). 

With a modest investment in any of the technologies listed here, you’re looking at solutions that are scalable, accurate, and adaptable to your unique goals. Here are six options you should consider deploying at your next trade show.


WiFi and Bluetooth Monitors

  • These monitors are placed around the event or in your booth, and ping and generate data based on the WiFi and bluetooth signals on cellphones. Through this detection, they can heat maps to help identify where visitors are throughout your space. While visitors must have the correct options activated on their mobile device for the pings to be effective, these beacons provide a rough analysis of the “hotspots” throughout the event.

Badge Scanners

  • Most trade shows provide their visitors with identification badges that can be scanned in different locations. While scans are a strong metric to track, you can also grab visitor information that they’ve voluntarily given to the trade show for use at a later date. While not everyone is going to scan their badge, the voluntary nature of the scans and information storage capabilities make for a great way to track visitors. 

Beacons and Wearables

  • Some trade shows go as far as to leverage chips in their badges or wearables that can be monitored by beacons placed around the event or in your trade show booth. Similar to Wifi and bluetooth monitors, they can be pinged and their movement tracked, and can also be used in the same way as a badge scanner, combining opportunities for both traffic analytics and contact information capture. 

Sign-in Kiosks

  • Self-explanatory, these are placed in dedicated kiosks, iPads, or tablet devices where visitors can provide their information if they’re interested in a product or business, entering a raffle, or just want to share their information. In the absence of badges or wearables at a show, this can be a quick solution to grab contact information from your visitors along with their business cards, and is a good solution if you’re looking for conversion metrics instead of entries or engagements. 

Cameras

  • Cameras can capture entire booths or areas of a trade show with ease. When a live feed or video is overlayed with grid software, it becomes possible to track entries and engagements throughout your space, which can be exported into hard data for interpretation. With cameras, there is always concerns for privacy which can potentially limit their deployability.

Smart Floor Sensors

  • Placed under the flooring of a trade show booth, entry ways, aisles, and more, smart floors can passively monitor footsteps, entries, engagements, and full pathways over large spaces. With a full deployment, you can capture when and where visitors are entering, where they’re going, how long they’re staying in certain areas or in front of displays or products to get a great idea of how your different offerings are performing.


Each technology offers positives and negatives in terms of capabilities, accuracy, and cost, so it’s important to determine what your goals are for your trade show analytics, what you’re tracking, and how committed you are to acting on the data you receive.

Each technology can serve as a powerful means to track engagements in your trade show booth as standalone solution or combined with another, but regardless of which option you choose, it will help you transform your booth from a passive display into a healthy contributor to your bottom-line. 

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