Why Retailers need strong People Counting Data and Reporting

While traffic counters have been a retail industry staple for decades, advances in technology, data, and analytics have opened up new opportunities to track more than just entries into your space.

Along with placement in your entryways, cameras, beam counters, and floor sensors can also be used throughout your space to give you a better idea of how your space is performing. And paired with strong data and reporting software can unleash new insights that can be tied to everything from your staff to energy costs. 

Here are just a few things you’ll be able to better manage and the benefits you’ll realize with a stronger commitment to people counting and traffic analytics.  

Shopper Traffic Insights

• At the heart of retail traffic analytics lies entries to your locations, as well as exits and occupancy to understand when shoppers are entering and how busy your space is. These basic metrics will help create a baseline to measure changes in your space against to determine their effectiveness.

Movements and Engagements 

• The ability to measure both movements through your space and where people are moving, dwelling, spending time can go a long way to understanding how your spaces are being utilized, what is capturing shopper attention, and where bottlenecks or issues may arise.

Design Changes

• To help your space perform better, it is often necessary to make changes to the design of your space. With a strong people counting system in place, you can measure how these changes benefit your space in both attracting new shoppers and creating a better experience once they enter.

Staffing

• With staffing accounting for a large portion of expenses, aligning your staff with traffic in your spaces can both help in managing costs when traffic is low and ensuring your visitors and shoppers can be best served when traffic peaks.

Operational Costs

• Similar to staffing, costs like lighting and HVAC or product orders can be made more efficiently with a stronger understanding of traffic trends. 

Displays and Marketing

• Like changes to the design of your space, tracking the effectiveness of your marketing and in-store displays on improving traffic will allow you identify what’s working and what isn’t. 

Conversion Rates

• To determine how well your store is performing, it’s essential to track sales but also how well you’re doing in converting your foot traffic into sales, and how changes in traffic are affecting those conversion rates.

If you have people counting hardware in place, you’re off to a great start. But real change and opportunities are available with additional hardware throughout your space and a commitment to more in-depth data and analysis. With a strong shopper counting and tracking system, you have the opportunity to track and analyze traffic in and throughout your location, can conduct testing to improve its performance, and understand the effects of those changes made in your space to improve your bottom-line. 

Learn more about Scanalytics Retail technologies, and how we can make it easier for you to analyze and improve the performance of your space.