Five things you need to know about: Footfall

1. Footfall, otherwise known as traffic or customer counting, is a tool that retailers first started using in the 1980s to continuously track the number of shoppers entering their stores.

It has only been over the last ten years though, as the technology has developed to deliver highly accurate data, that leading retailers have started adding it as a pre- requisite to their new store build and re-fit programmes.

Retail operators have primarily used this measure to better understand what’s driving their sales performance – more people entering their stores or a better so-called “conversion rate” (how many people buy versus enter) and perhaps to aid in staff scheduling.

 

2. The real opportunity for using traffic data is much broader

It strikes at the core of an holistic performance and improvement framework, spanning all functional teams from marketing to customer insight, HR to operations and all tiers of the retailer hierarchy from store manager to the trading exec board.

3. Marketing agencies around the globe are beginning to use customer counting in their repertoire to measure and model the effectiveness of the advertising and promotional campaigns they develop for their retail clients.

Most conventional measurement tools look at either the sales impact (did the campaign increase our sales volume or overall value?) or consumers’ attitudinal impact (do they view our brand differently in some way or have a higher awareness – captured through prompted or unprompted recollection).  

By adding store traffic as a measure you can evaluate another step – for example the direct effect of advertising on drawing customer traffic to stores – in our understanding of what Synovate calls the “pathways to purchase”.

In many respects it is a far purer measure of this part of the decision-making process than a comparison against a change in sales which is reliant on extraneous factors such as the product being available and the store staff being trained to properly serve the customer.

4. Advertising campaigns do not have the same impact on footfall across all stores.

By analysing the changes in traffic against store type, catchment demographics and location (urban, rural, semi-urban) – mall versus high street, destination locations versus experience or flagship locations - agencies gain feedback on which types of store see a better response than the rest and can ultimately help shape ongoing campaign targeting.

This is good news for both agency and client – more effective use of budget and a new means to find responsive shoppers. This level of granularity is not something that has been widely measured or modelled to date.

5. Multi-channel retailing needs integrated metrics.

With the advent of on-line retailing, and expanding capabilities of mobile communications in the development of contextually relevant, “opt in” location-based marketing, the ability to track and model the impact of all components of multi-media campaigns has never been so vital.

In reality, too much analysis is isolated and reported in isolation. Customer counting in stores and on- line adds a link at the “business end” of the research trail, covering consumers’ “pathways to purchase” – from awareness and on to consideration, through to commitment and finally purchase.