Foot Traffic In Your Store. How PlanoHero traffic report can help?

Physical store owners are working hard to attract more customers and increase revenue. One of the main indicators of high sales is the high customer traffic (foot traffic) of the store. How many customers visit your physical store?

What is Foot Traffic?

Store traffic rate is the number of people who visited the store in a given period of time.

Customer traffic – information about the attendance and intensity of the customer movement for a certain period of time. By analyzing traffic data, you can calculate the conversion – the proportion of buyers who bought goods from the general flow of people who visited the store.

Pay attention to foot traffic before opening a store in a particular location. After all, with more traffic near the store, more potential buyers will visit the shop.

Heatmap of the Customer Traffic in Retail Store

You can determine the areas of the largest and smallest concentrations of customers on the trading floor. These are places that buyers visit more frequently and areas where customers almost never buy. These are so-called in-store cold and hot zones, which form a heatmap of the customer movement. And this map is available in the PlanoHero service.

Cold zones are places that are ignored by customers. The sales there are lower than the average for the store. Conversely, hot zones are places with the highest sales and turnover rates. In the PlanoHero service, you can get an analytical report on how customers move into the store at a certain time or day, for example, on Monday morning or Friday evening.

For instance, customers who bought bread, according to the analysis of the foot traffic, also visited the dairy department. In this way, you can determine how buyers move when buying a particular product.

How to Measure Foot Traffic?

The easiest way is to use meters, mobile surveillance technologies, heat sensors, or video surveillance. These tools count the number of shoppers and track customer behavior, waiting time, and other metrics.

Traffic information is critical to increasing sales and profits. When analyzing traffic, attention is paid to peak hours and days of maximum customer activity. Operating data, the retailer can prepare: make additional orders for top-selling items, take care of efficient layout and adjust working hours, and train staff so that more cashiers and shop assistants work during peak hours.

Sales tracking gives you insight into what products are in demand in your store. So, if product sales were low during peak hours, perhaps this product needs to be removed from the assortment, or you should think about discounts and promotions.

In large chain stores, electronic attendance tracking technologies are commonly used. So, data from cameras and touch sensors allow you to determine the rate of attendance at the store.

According to statistics, in January 2022, overall store traffic decreased by almost 8% compared to January 2019. There is now a significant upgrade from the peak of the pandemic.

Analytical Report “Visitors Traffic” in the PlanoHero Service

Higher traffic – more sales

Meanwhile, traffic can increase due to promotions and discounts.

With the help of a heatmap in the PlanoHero service, you can track how traffic and sales in a store change after a promotion or the introduction of new products.

The analytical report “Visitors traffic” generates a heat map of the movement of buyers on the trading floor. This report is generated based on checks for the selected period. Thus, it is possible to determine the features of the customers’ movement on the trading floor for a certain period and at a certain time.

On the store plan, you can see zones where goods are most often bought. Places on the heat map highlighted in red and yellow show the greatest concentration of people and the highest in-store sales, and in blue and green – are places where customers buy the least.

Visitors' traffic map in PlanoHero service

When you hover over the trading equipment on the map, you’ll see the number of checks and sales indicators for a certain period.

In the PlanoHero service, using a heat map, you can:

• monitor the customers' traffic in the store at different hours and days of the week;
• determine cold and hot zones of the trading floor;
• analyze the places of the greatest and lowest sales, best-selling and slow-moving goods.

Use a heat map to understand the processes taking place in your store. Apply this knowledge to increase sales and customer retention.

With the customer traffic report, you can optimize space and increase sales through strategic product placement. It is also recommended to regularly update the range of goods in places with the heaviest visitor traffic. Measuring customer traffic will help forecast sales and allow for avoiding lost sales and stockouts, and vice versa.

Omnichannel

Retailers are working to continually find new opportunities to encourage shoppers to return to stores. The combination of the latest technology with traditional shopping creates a unique experience that is difficult to compare with e-commerce.

Here, omnichannel shopping becomes perhaps the most effective solution. Customers search for products online and use physical stores as a place to come, evaluate and purchase products.

Working with layout

Understanding the behavior of store visitors allows you to understand their needs and preferences. This knowledge allows you to optimize the placement of commercial equipment, as well as work more efficiently with the layout. Therefore, merchandising and planograms are important here. Knowing the places of greater concentration of buyers, merchandisers place popular products there. The effective layout on the planogram and in the store allows you to increase the profitability of the store. And an attractive layout is a way to draw the client's attention and increase sales.

Critical!

When creating a layout, take into account seasonality, holidays, promotions, and historical sales. Use special layouts for unique offers for your customers. Group products by brand, by purpose so that it is easy for customers to find and buy them.

Take care of the shelf's constant updating. Add new positions, and remove slow-moving items and expired goods from the assortment on time.

How to increase foot traffic?

1. Physical stores need an online presence. It increases awareness of the company, brands, and store. We are talking about the website, presence on social networks, and advertising.
2. In-store promotional events will also help attract customers. Reward customers with offers that your competitors don't have. Make them feel special and convince them to shop with you.
3. Offer a store pickup service. Give the opportunity to order goods online and pick up the order in the store.
4. Use geolocation. This a great opportunity to attract customers who are close to the store. People who don't know about your store can find it using Google Maps. This is an additional opportunity for impulse purchases and attracting new potential customers.
5. Offer additional free services if possible. For example, a pet supply store may offer a free veterinary consultation service to regular customers.

Perhaps these ideas will come in handy depending on the format of your store. Or maybe you will have your own ideas to increase customer traffic and increase revenue.

Conclusions

The customer traffic on the trading floor of the store seems at first glance uncontrolled and chaotic. In fact, you can manage this flow of customers to increase sales and revenue. But this requires a preliminary analysis of how buyers are moving and what are their potential needs.

Finally, using the PlanoHero service and the report on visitor traffic, you can identify hot and cold zones and analyze the places of greatest and lowest sales. Such analytics allows you to understand what products are bought and which aren’t. It also allows you to find out the strengths and weaknesses of sales. Do you know the customer journey? Use this knowledge to form an attractive layout. Place the most popular product along the customer's path.

Update shelves, place new products, combine, and experiment!