How to Analyze and Increase Foot Traffic in your Space
Monitoring and analyzing foot traffic in a public or private space can provide important insights for your organization. While in some cases more people = greater success, others are more focused on efficient use of resources, staffing, energy, and more. Regardless of your objectives, these insights can’t be ignored.
If you’re monitoring this traffic into and in your space with the assistance of technology, you’re off to a great start. But just gathering this data isn’t enough. There needs to be a focus on analyzing the foot traffic you’re capturing, and creating a system for testing and action.
Here’s how you should start analyzing foot traffic, and making the most of your insights.
Develop a baseline of traffic into your location. Without a baseline or “normal” of what average traffic looks like, you’ll have nothing to compare your changes to. This baseline doesn’t have to be hyper-granular, but should at least breakdown averages per day, if not per hour, per day. Your baseline generation period will vary depending on your application. It could be a few shows for a trade show booth, a few months for a commercial space, or up to a year for a restaurant or retail location to accommodate for seasonality. Learn more about developing your reporting threshold here!
Normalize peaks on a daily, weekly basis, or yearly. This “rush-hour” metric helps you identify when you’re the busiest in terms of traffic and can be essential to ensure you’re staffed appropriately and have the proper resources deployed. Peaks can also be planned, such as a sale, new product launch, or new marketing initiative. Test these events, and plan accordingly.
Identify outliers that were not predicted or planned. Why was last week so quiet? How come today is so busy? Tracking outlier days or weeks can force you to investigate outside factors that you’ve never considered, and can put you in a better position to react and take advantage of the increase or decrease in traffic.
Run comparatives on days of the week, weeks, months, and more. While the differences in these comparatives can be insightful, the greatest insights will be comparing your baseline numbers with the special events, marketing initiatives, sales and more. How much did they help? Did the increase in traffic create an increase in conversions? Was the investment worth it? What could you do differently? Don’t be afraid to run some A/B tests!
With a commitment to testing, analysis, and action, you’ll create a system that allows you to identify what it takes to increase foot traffic to your location.