10 Great reasons to monitor and measure your footfall

1. Staff Planning & Optimisation – whether you are in retail, leisure a service industry or a public sector venue; staff optimisation is paramount, and not necessarily about reducing staff, but about ensuring that the right number of staff, are in the right place, at the right time to achieve the right staff to customer ratio. 

By monitoring the peaks and troughs in hourly, daily, and weekly traffic, you can refine and tailor your staff schedule to maximise customer service, reduce customer queue wait times and lessen the number of customer complaints, avoid lost opportunities and disappointed customers.

2. Occupancy Management for special events – leisure facilities such as swimming pools, night clubs and bars, as well as sports and music arenas need to monitor pedestrian traffic flows to manage occupancy levels and ensure that maximum occupancy health and safety thresholds are not breached.  Retailers running special promotions may not realise that there is an optimum occupancy for their stores, above which people refuse to queue and abandon store.  People Counting and queue management systems can help you ensure that you reduce the number of missed sales opportunities during busy periods.

3. Measuring the Impact of Marketing, Advertising and promotions – An old adage goes; we know that 50% of advertising works, but we don’t know which 50%.

Advertising & marketing is a necessary and costly evil; so the more metrics we have to understand it the better. It may be easy to use sales metrics alone to prove a specific advertising campaign or promotion has worked.

i.e.  ‘We advertised and sales went up by 10%, it was a great success’ – but hold on what if this marketing actually doubled the number of people visiting your site? That means that although sales went up by 10% there was another X% worth of missed opportunities.

Measuring footfall gives you better metrics for assessing the effectiveness of your advertising spend ensuring that you achieve maximum return on your investment.  This will help to give you a better idea of which media works best, and how to best capitalise on its effectiveness.

4. Comparing Multiple sites – You may have two sites or a 2,000 site portfolio, either way their performance is going to be affected by a range of factors. Two sites may be performing similarly in terms of sales, but only measuring visitor numbers can you determine the number of lost opportunities and create a clear comparison of metrics to give a true picture of each stores performance.

5. Opening Hours – although details of transaction times will tell you when a sale is made, a people counting system can tell you whether potential customers are browsing your sites even when no purchases are made. This can help you make an educated decision about extending or reducing opening hours.

6. The Impact of Weather – if you are selling umbrellas then rain may be a blessing, if you’re selling sun-cream perhaps not. OK that’s a simplistic view, but we all know that the weather can have an impact on behavior, and potentially impact whether people are going to visit your site or not.

Indoor Shopping Centres often receive more visitors when it is wet and cold – but what is the real impact of the weather on your business when it comes to actual footfall?

7. Sales Conversion – this is the only true measure of a retailer performance. Using a system to monitor the number of visitors to site and then comparing this with the number of sales and value to give a clear picture of the site and staff performance. Drilling down will also enable the understanding of where additional staff training may be required.

8. Room Utilisation and Optimisation of Building Management Systems – using people counters or desk sensors to monitor the number of people in a building, or in specific rooms can help you to monitor and manage effective use of this space, as well as reducing costs such as operational or energy.

9. Comparing Trends Over-Time – Footfall data can give you a clear picture of whether your site is attracting more or less visitors over time helping you to confirm whether you are achieving your Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s). It will also indicate if a refresh of the store is necessary.

10. To give you the edge – People counting can do more than just monitor basic footfall trends. The solution can be used to give you a better picture of your store traffic, highlight average dwell times, average store occupancy, confirm customer paths through a site, confirm customer density and dwell times in key promotional areas, monitor queue lengths, customer wait times and service times – all helping you to be one step ahead of the competition.