Introduction

In recent years, the world of retail has become increasingly reliant on geodata, location analysis, and foot traffic analytics. These are helping retailers understand customer behavior, store performance, the competitive landscape and the effectiveness of marketing strategies. But why are foot traffic & visits that important in the context of geospatial data and location intelligence for retailers?

1. Understanding Foot Traffic & visits

Foot traffic & store visits, critical metrics for retailers, refer to the count of individuals entering a retail establishment during a specific timeframe. It serves as a direct measure of (potential) customers interacting with your brand and products, making it a pivotal aspect of location intelligence and geospatial data analysis.

Retailers have relied on a more ‘classical approach’ of foot traffic for too long. Here a pin is dropped and all traffic around this pin is calculated. This is called geofencing and is incomplete as no store ever is ‘just’ circular (at least not the ones we know 😁)

1.1 How to measure: traffic

There are a number of ways to measure traffic.

1.  One way could be through video analytics. Video analytics in retail stores use cameras and software to track customer movement, count visitors, and gather data on store traffic patterns. This data helps retailers optimize store layouts and improve marketing strategies.
2. Another way could be via people counters, there are digital ones placed at the entrance of your store or you could hire a working student and let them count vigorously. However, this can be time-consuming, very inaccurate and most of all: expensive. Also, let’s be honest, they probably would be busier checking their phones then they would be providing the right data.
3. Luckily, the phone they're using is the solution at hand! A more accurate way to measure foot traffic is to use smartphone gps technology. This is what Accurat does. We have data originating from our self-built SDK that collects data through partnering up with different smartphone applications. Today the number of users using our SDK throughout Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg & Germany ranks in the millions.