Building a strong Foot Traffic Analytics System in Four Steps
Do you understand the foot traffic in your space?
If your organization has a physical location, you’ve probably looked at or asked for a better system for keeping track of when visitors are passing through your doors and traveling to certain areas of your space.
The ability to know when and how often visitors are coming into your space opens up a multitude of opportunities, and is in high demand in many applications -
Retail stores and commercial buildings
Restaurants and markets
Trade shows and events
Theatres and museums
Hospitals and clinics
While systems to track foot traffic analytics are in demand in a variety of industries, the goals of operators in these industries are also diverse, from improving sales and traffic to more efficient staffing and resource usage.
Regardless of your goals, there are a few steps you must follow to create or launch a system that delivers accurate and actionable foot traffic analytics.
Choose a Technology
There are numerous technologies that can help capture foot traffic analytics. Cameras can provide a wide coverage of entire areas, while things like beacons and beam-counters can offer quick and easy solutions for entries. Depending on your budget, space design, and goals, each can offer a standalone solution, or can be combined to create a stronger, more robust system for capturing traffic metrics. You can learn more about tracking technologies like cameras and smart flooring here.
Set a Reporting Threshold
Determine how granular you want your analytics to be. We recommend displaying your metrics per hour, per day. Also determine what metrics you’ll be reporting on. Do you just want to keep track of visitors entering your space? How about engagement time in certain spaces or lines? Or tying your entrants to conversions at the cash register? Again, align your choice of tracking technology capabilities with your metric goals. Check out more tips on reporting here.
Prepare for Analysis
Once you’ve selected a tracking technology and what metrics you’ll be reporting on, it’s critical to set a cadence of analysis and interpretation of your data. To help with this, you’ll need to find or create a system for pulling these metrics and organizing them in a format that can help you identify baselines, trends, and outliers. While some technologies come with software integrations, often the result is a CSV with raw data. Services like DataStudio, Tableau, and Scanalytics can help you visualize this data. Get more best practices on increasing your foot traffic here.
Plan your Testing
With your system ready, it’s up to you to make the best use of it. Make changes to your marketing initiatives, offer up new sales or services, create new displays, and track the effect they have on your foot traffic analytics. The end goal is to experiment and find what works and what doesn’t in terms of bringing in new and more traffic to your location, to help you adjust staffing and resource management to better match that traffic, and ultimately help improve your bottom line through greater engagement and more efficient operations. Start your testing initiative by learning more here.