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2014 is All About the Power Retail Traffic Analytics

What can location awareness technology tell retail-ers that they don’t already know? A wide range of important insights. Retailers are acutely aware of what happens at the register, but the true and pre-cise path to purchase INSIDE the store is critical data that is only available with this new technology. Aggregated traffic behavior is a measurement that empowers every category of retail optimization. This Includes merchandising, store

operations and marketing.

What are important steps to take to maximize the full benefits of location awareness capabilities?First, not all location technologies do the same thing. There are many types of applications; some look at the store as a single zone, and others can iden-tify every individual aisle, department – even end-caps. Second, get past the hardware. Your decision should include features, cost, ease of operation, flexibility of reporting, even what it costs to maintain and operate over time. Third, get your team together. This is an infrastructure decision, so make sure merchandising, store operations, marketing and IT are all on the team. While that sounds like a handful, that’s what it takes to get a decision made. Lastly is the need to treat vendors like consultants. Strive to determine the highest value applications with location technology. Do this, and the tech-nology will make fiscal sense and proceed through the budget process.

Putting Traffic Analytics into Action

With 30 global patents and 15+ years of unrivaled technology expertise, iInside delivers Retail’s most precise, actionable indoor location solutions. From traffic analytics to departmental performance metrics, iInside advanced shopper behavioral data adds a powerful dimension of insights that both empower decision makers and improve the customer shopping experience.

Jim RiesenbachCEO iInside

Which departments in the retail organization will be able to make the best use of location awareness data?For store operations, one key measurement that requires indoor shop-per data is Conversion. Departmental performance can now be used as a means to optimize every part of the store or a single department across the entire organization. For merchandisers, traffic data provides a detailed un-derstanding of the effect of practically every major merchandising adjust-ment. Marketing is provided with shopper behavioral feedback to quickly and accurately determine campaign impact. This is data unavailable at the register and is highly actionable by retail professionals.

Where can retailers look to achieve ROI on their location aware-ness investment?There are at least two key categories of opportunity: benchmarking and performance. Under “benchmarking,” traffic becomes a means to mea-sure each key action taken by marketing and merchandising. For exam-ple, First Visit Location is a traffic indicator of “shopper intent.” Using this metric, Marketing is provided with feedback to determine campaign im-pact and success. Since not every shopper makes a purchase, the effect of marketing is reflected in traffic, which is a far more detailed feedback mechanism than what lies merely at the register. The same “effect” mea-surement also applies to each significant merchandising action. Under the “performance” category, conversion is a great example of the ability to see departmental-level performance across the chain, both in number of shoppers and dwell time in specific departments or areas. To store man-agers, that means each of their departments can be measured against the average and trended over time. To Category Leads, that means measuring their category/department across each store in the entire chain. Either way, traffic delivers actionable, new metrics that will soon become a ubiquitous standard.

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