The Best Way to Gather Foot Traffic Data, How to Analyze It and How to Use it in Your Advertising
As a brick and mortar store it’s key to translate your foot traffic data to your digital advertising strategy in a way that serves up personalized ads. In this article, we’ll go over how you can collect foot traffic data, what to analyze and how that data can guide your advertising strategy.
Collecting Foot Traffic Data
You don’t need to stand at your door and manually count everyone who enters to measure your foot traffic. But just how can you translate your foot traffic to your advertising? How can you collect data that will be useful to you?
There are more traditional ways of collecting that data, but those traditional ways can sometimes be time consuming like combing through security camera footage to determine what time of day is your busiest time. Other traditional methods require posting signs in your store encouraging customers to sign up for your newsletter or follow your social accounts. However, there is a far easier method for collecting foot traffic data, not just at your location(s) but at your competitor’s location(s) as well.
Our Location Listening services allow you to easily collect foot traffic data that is most meaningful to you. How does it work? Each GPS-enabled mobile device is assigned a Mobile Ad ID (MAID) and the location of that device can be tracked through permission-based apps on the mobile device. With our Location Listening services, you can set up geographic locations that are important to you such as the one mile radius around your or a competitor’s store. Then, we provide a daily report of privacy compliant Mobile Ad IDs that have intersected with your defined geographic zones. And you don’t have to wait to collect a month of data once you have signed up for our services. We include 3 months of historical data to get you started! 
opens IMAGE file
Foot Traffic Analysis
Now that you have all this data, what do you look at? Our Location Listening services give you plenty of ways to gain insight from all that data. You can:
- View traffic levels at all of your defined locations
- Compare traffic at any location by date, day of the week or even by the hour
- See who visits a location most often
- Compare visitors over time, from hour by hour, day by day, all the way up to year over year
- Compare promotional day traffic to see who’s busier
From Foot Traffic to Advertising
We’ve looked at the data you can collect and how you can analyze it, so how does that translate to your digital advertising? What makes Location Listening great for brick and mortar stores is that you can personalize your advertising based on the MAIDs data you receive. Studies show that personalized ads work better so if the people visiting your store or your competitor’s store are warm leads they’re already interested in what you have to offer and are more willing to make a purchase if you serve up meaningful, personal content to them. Here are some advertising strategy ideas:
- By comparing when your busiest times are, you can see holes that need to be filled. For example, your busiest time is around the holidays and you see a big drop off in foot traffic after the new year. Use your data to create custom social media audiences and run programmatic ads in the new year with a sale that will encourage people to come back and make another purchase.
- Offer loyalty rewards to VIPs. With our services, you can see who visits your location most often. Show ads to those customers promoting your loyalty rewards program.
- Serve ads to your competitor’s customers such as showing them a coupon for your store or advertising a product exclusive to your store.
Conclusion
With Location Listening from Data-Dynamix, you can easily gather and analyze foot traffic data. Once you have this data, you can create custom audiences on social media or newsletter services to get new customers or keep your current ones coming back time and again!