Store traffic

What is store traffic?

Store traffic, also known as foot traffic, is a retail and eCommerce metric that denotes the number of visitors to the mortar-and-brick or online store during a particular time. In retail terms, store traffic is the number of customers a location could engage in a certain period of time, or the potential revenue it could generate during the same time. With users being more driven by online platforms, store traffic is gaining its significance in retail analytics, becoming an important retail value-driving KPIs—a value that drives smart inventory planning, shelfing, and marketing strategies.

Foot traffic and store traffic are often used exchangeable – foot traffic denoting the actual number of people entering the store, measured with the help of sensors, cameras, or manually.

Foot traffic vs sales traffic

Foot traffic and sales traffic are different but often used together. Foot traffic is total number of people entering the store, whereas sales traffic is where people make the actual purchase. With these two metrics, you can measure the conversion rate, which is (sales traffic/foot traffic).

Industries relying on foot traffic

1 - Apparel, fashion, and accessories 2 - Malls and department stores 3 - Grocery chains and convenience stores 4 - Restaurants and hotel chains 5 - Healthcare and pharma retail

Why should you track foot traffic?

Tracking store traffic helps you with the following:

1 - Can understand customers and their behavior patterns. 2 - Track busy hours with historical data and plan staff schedules accordingly. 3 - Increase conversion rates, by comparing foot traffic or store traffic with respective sales value. 4 - Use it to predict demand and future visitor trends. 5 - Use it to prove the ROI of marketing campaigns.

Why store traffic or foot traffic important for mortar & brick businesses?

For retail businesses, foot or store traffic is the lead indicator of how much customers walk in, highlighting the potential customers they could sell their products to. If the store traffic is low, the sales would become low too, and vice versa. But, in some cases, store traffic can be high, yet no or low sales. This is where other retail KPIs, average transaction value, conversion rate, and other KPIs come into play.

Tracking store traffic is becoming too important for retail, especially after Covid 19, which led to a sharp downfall of store visitors, leading to many retail companies adopt a more phygital approach. All of this are pushing retailers to leverage data dashboards to balance in-store and online strategies more effectively.

How to measure store traffic?

There are multiple ways to track store traffic values of retail stores and online stores. Some common ways to track traffic for retail are:

1 - Old-school methods like counting (which may suit small businesses) 2 - Infrared sensors placed at the entrances 3 - Smart cameras and video analytics 4 - Retail analytics dashboards, which consolidates traffic, store sales, marketing spend, and other seasonality data to measure a unified performance. This solution is much suitable for retail brands with multiple stores across a city or a country, where tracking every store traffic from one location is possible.

How to track store traffic with retail dashboards?

1 - Bring the data from sensors and cameras that track traffic into a centralized database or a warehouse. 2 - Collect real-time data from POS systems to allow cross-referencing sales vs visits and measure conversion rates. 3 - Set up dashboards using Tableau, Power BI, or ThoughtSpot to facilitate visual reporting of the following data.

4 - Set necessary thresholds to alert retail store managers when the traffic data falls below a destined value.

Other retail KPIs to track

If you want your foot traffic or store traffic data to make complete sense, you need to track it with other data.

All these KPIs and other analytics metrics of retail and eCommerce can be tracked with the help of retail analytics dashboards.

Foot traffic and retail analytics

There are many modern retail analytics tools and custom retail solutions that leverage data, AI, IoT, and other technologies.

The bottom-line is whether it’s improving customer experience, increasing sales, or cutting costs—foot traffic tracking and retail analytics provides the centralized visibility and direction modern retailers need to stay competitive.