If you’ve been considering implementing a footfall counting solution for your retail site, event, town or BID area, you may be wondering if it’s worth the investment. This technology is becoming increasingly popular as businesses and local councils look for ways to improve visitor engagement and gather data that will help to mitigate what is being coined as the ‘new abnormal‘, where soaring inflation rates and energy costs continue to disrupt supply chains, sales performance and consumer confidence.
Why Measure Footfall?
Footfall counting is a useful tool for understanding and tracking the number of people passing through an area including high streets, tourist attractions and public parks. When used correctly, it can provide valuable insights into customer behaviour, foot traffic patterns, space utilisation and much more to help optimise operations and make strategic decisions about future investment or commercial opportunities.
For a time, traditional people counting hardware systems such as CCTV, Wi-Fi sensors or manual clickers were used to gather occupancy data. However, these methods can be expensive, and prone to double counting or human error. They also have no way to provide any analysis of how a location is used by visitors and the home postcode origins of who visits. Enter AI and machine learning technology which is linked to socio-demographic data.
The benefits of AI driven footfall counting software
Now, there are many more sophisticated ways to measure footfall thanks to the development of AI combined with big data intelligent algorithms and statistical analysis, we are able to investigate trends, patterns and relationships. Our dashboards deliver around 95% footfall counting accuracy, including additional visitor behaviour insights for towns and cities across the UK.
Here are some of the key benefits of our AI driven footfall data:
1. Get accurate data with a historical roll back
One of the benefits of AI footfall counting software is that it can provide historical data back to the pre-covid year of 2019, which enables years of comparisons to take place. This is important because it allows you to make informed decisions about resource allocation and staffing levels based on daily, weekly or monthly foot traffic patterns. The hardware option cannot look back historically or filter out environmental factors that can throw off the count, like wind or shadows, so you can be confident that the data you’re seeing is accurate.
2. Save money
AI footfall counting software is also very cost-effective. You’ll no longer need to install expensive hardware such as cameras or sensors, or hire someone to manually count visitors as they enter a specific area. As well as being cost effective, the data is freely available in a dashboard browser, ready to analyse whenever required and distribute to key stakeholders.
3. Better customer insights
The data from Place Informatics is highly rich in visitor behaviour information in addition to footfall monitoring, so you can find out how many of visitors in a postcode actually set foot in a certain location and find out their socio-demographic profiles. Discover locations with high affluence / low affluence and demographic data such as age, gender, dwelling type, income and spending habits, which can all help to plan promotions, maximise revenue and create better customer experiences for visitors.
4. Isochrone Mapping and Heatmaps
With AI footfall counting software, you can use isochrone maps to easily see which locations are accessible within a 30, 20, or 10 minute time-frame via a distinct mode of transport (walking, cycling, driving), helping you to define areas to target with your marketing and, following implementation of this, track results. Heatmaps show where the majority of people go in a location which can be helpful in a number of ways, like determining where to place high-demand items, evaluating the effectiveness of an event, or identifying dead zones or and hotspots across car parks, green spaces and pathways.
5. Investment & marketing optimization
For town centres and BIDS, the robust AI driven visitor data evidence will simply help funding assessors or investors to back your initiatives. For retail and leisure sites, the data will help in upselling agreements with tenants and traders, assist in staging events and determining customer profiles for targeted marketing campaigns.
The ultimate aim of consistent footfall data monitoring is to develop an astute awareness of how your visitors behave, where they come from and what they do in order to implement changes that will drive more loyal, profitable visitors to your town, tourist attraction or retail / leisure centre.
Get in touch
If you’re looking for a way to give your business or town a competitive edge, gain access to AI driven footfall data available from Place Informatics. Call 0161 706 1343 for more information, or book a webinar in Calendly here for a free demonstration: