Online shopping is booming in the post-pandemic world—the ecommerce market is expected to grow by 6.69% in the US, leading to a worth of a massive $1.82 trillion in 2024. However, despite many thinking that retail is a dying industry, this couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, retail sales in the US increased 2.3% year-on-year in May 2024, and total retail sales for Q1 in 2024 were estimated at $1,820 billion.
Since the majority of sales are still taking place in brick-and-mortar stores, retail business owners are looking for ways to measure the impact of their online campaigns in the offline world.
With so many tools now available for measuring online attribution, including mobile footprinting, marketers looking to get ahead of the competition are now turning to footfall analytics to determine the number of visitors being driven to their stores by online campaigns.
And with the programmatic world preparing for a cookieless future, advertisers are increasingly looking for new ways to measure the effectiveness of programmatic ad campaigns.
Footfall attribution helps you understand the relationship between online campaigns and offline sales, and can provide insights into your customers’ behavior that can help optimize ad campaigns. Partnering this with programmatic digital out-of-home (pDOOH) advertising, advertisers will need to rely on footprinting and Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO) to display targeted ads to customers in-store, as opposed to relying on third-party cookie data.
Here, we’ll go through the basics of footfall traffic attribution and cover some best practices to help you get it right. We’ve also created a handy footfall calculator, to help you figure out your footfall and allow you to optimize your advertising strategy.
What Is Footfall Attribution?
Footfall — or foot traffic — attribution allows you to measure the number of people visiting your retail store after viewing an online ad campaign. It’s an essential part of the customer journey mapping strategy, and provides a complete picture of how effective your ads are by proving their impact.
Footfall attribution can help you understand consumer behavior and demographics. By looking at who visits your stores and how long they spend there, you can leverage the information to drive more engagement.
Additionally, analyzing footfall data can help you optimize cross-channel advertising campaigns by identifying which channels and strategies are most effective at driving in-store traffic. You can use these actionable insights to optimize future campaigns and ensure maximum impact and return on ad spend.
How To Calculate Footfall
In order to properly calculate your footfall traffic, you’ll need the clear data. This could be from manually counting how many people enter/exit your store, infrared sensors in store to track customer movement, or from video analytic style technologies from your CCTV and security cameras. Some stores can even track customers through WiFi tracking, which counts how many WiFi signals your phone sends out. By counting each unique ID (which equates to specific phones), you can identify and count visitors to your store or space.
Another way to calculate footfall is by mobile footprinting, which is when advertisers identify users based on their mobile device’s location data. This allows them to target hyper-relevant ads at their customer base when they’re in a specific location.
Use our calculator to work out your daily footfall ratio. All you need to know is how many people entered your store within a given time period (this could be the length of time your shop was open in a day).
Interactive calculator – calculating footfall
Measuring Retail Footfall Ratio
Once you know how many individuals entered your store, you’ll be able to calculate the retail footfall ratio, which is the rate of conversions in your store. This allows you to check how many sales you’re making in comparison to bodies in your store.
To work out the footfall ratio, you need to divide the number of people by the total number of transactions.
For example, if you have 300 people enter your store in a day, and 150 transactions take place in the same day, your retail footfall ratio would be calculated as
300/150 = 2
Your footfall ratio for this day will be 2.
Calculate your own retail footfall ratio using our calculator, and download our handy guide to calculating footfall.
Interactive calculator – calculating retail footfall ratio
By keeping track of how many people enter your store or space, and how many sales you made, you’ll be able to better understand your conversion rate—that is, how many of your visitors convert into customers. This also allows you to make informed decisions about merchandising, in-store marketing and promotions.
For example, you may choose to change the floor layout to help visitors journey through your store, or make promotional material more obvious in your store. Sales items, for instance, can be pushed to the front of the store to entice visitors in and hopefully encourage them to buy.
5 Tips for Measuring Footfall Traffic Effectively
Measuring footfall attribution requires gathering location data from customers’ smartphones and mobile devices and attributing them to online campaigns.
One way to evaluate the success of a campaign is to measure any lifts in foot traffic following your campaign — for example, by comparing the percentage of people in your retail stores who have been exposed to your ad with the percentage of people who have not been exposed.
Use the following five tips to measure foot traffic effectively.
1. Use a Multi-Touch Attribution Approach
Consumer journeys are rarely a one-touch process, and most customers interact with multiple touchpoints before visiting a store. By using a multi-touch attribution approach and linking data from several sources across various phases of the consumer journey, you can:
- Reduce the uncertainty that comes from the complexity of the offline buyer journey.
- Gain a more accurate understanding of how your marketing campaigns impact footfall.
- Optimize your campaigns accordingly.
2. Use the Right Data
Not all foot traffic data is created equal. Seasonality, location, weather, local events, and other offline factors can significantly influence footfall data, making it difficult to accurately attribute success solely to marketing efforts. For example, footfall might be higher during holiday seasons or weekends, making it harder to assess the impact of a particular campaign or strategy.
To address this issue, consider developing internal indices for comparing performance. You can tailor these indices to a variety of factors such as location, time of day, or any other external factors that may influence footfall.
This method can help provide a more accurate picture of how effective a specific campaign or strategy has been in driving customer behavior. For example, a retailer with multiple locations could compare the performance of different stores by taking into account each location’s unique characteristics, such as foot traffic patterns, local events, and seasonal trends. This would help identify which stores are performing well and which may require additional assistance or attention.
3. Measure Attribution Against Benchmarks
How can you tell how your campaigns measure up against competitors in your industry? By using attribution benchmarks. The most important metrics to measure against are:
- Brand uplift: This measures the impact of ad exposure in driving in-store visits and the percentage difference in visitation rates between exposed and unexposed groups
- Visit rate: Identifies the average daily Point of Interest (POI) visits. POI describes specific locations that are of interest to a particular audience or user group
- Dwell time: The amount of time spent at a specific POI
- CPIV (cost per incremental visit): The budget spend required for one incremental visit
- CPV (cost per visit): the budget spent required for all visits to the store
4. Understand the Customer Journey
Footfall attribution is just one piece of the customer journey puzzle. To truly understand how marketing campaigns impact footfall, you need to be familiar with your customer’s entire journey from awareness to purchase.
By mapping out this journey, you can identify the touchpoints that have the most significant impact on footfall and optimize your campaigns accordingly.
5. Define Clear KPIs and Success Metrics
It’s essential to define clear key performance indicators (KPIs) for footfall attribution. These KPIs should align with your overall business objectives and help measure the success of your ad campaigns.
Some examples of KPIs for footfall attribution include:
- Store visit rate
- Store visit duration
- Cost per store visit
It’s equally important to define success markers for each campaign since the parameters of success may vary from one campaign to another. For instance, a campaign for perishable household goods will have different success metrics than a car sales campaign because of the frequency and repetition of purchase — you might buy tomatoes every week, but may only buy a car once every ten to twenty years.
How to Use Footfall to Inform Your Next Programmatic Ad Campaign
As mentioned above, using footfall data can help you make informed decisions about your marketing campaigns—this includes your programmatic ad campaigns. By analyzing your footfall data, you’ll be able to attribute high-traffic ratio times to specific advertising strategies you’ve launched.
Footfall can often be attributed not only to a specific programmatic channel but also to individual strategies. If you have previously run programmatic campaigns with broad targeting, you can leverage historical data to identify and focus on the audiences that generated the most cost-efficient footfall. Using this past data allows you to segment audiences based on factors such as interest, demographic information, and geography to maximize footfall volume.
But what do you do if this is your first programmatic campaign? You can still leverage real-world customer information to inform future campaigns. By collecting customer data in-store and segmenting it by factors like geography, age, and demographics, you can jump-start any new programmatic campaign with the audience insights you already have.
For example, you may highlight a new audience you want to target based on a brand refresh or rebrand activity, or notice that you’re not effectively targeting your target market based on the visitors you get to your store. You can fix this by gathering data from your in-store visitors and shoppers, and comparing this with who you are targeting in your programmatic ads. Comparing this data will allow you to make any necessary adjustments to your target audience, ensuring that your ad is seen by who you want to see it.
Footfall Measurement FAQs
What Is the Measure of Footfall?
Footfall refers to the number of people who visit your physical store or location and is used to measure the retail footfall ratio, which is the conversion rate of visitors to shoppers.
Why Measure Footfall?
The footfall gives you an indication of how successful you are at marketing your store and driving visitors to the location. More visitors indicates that you’re doing something right by encouraging people to visit your location.
How Do You Calculate Footfall?
You can calculate footfall using a number of methods, such as:
- Manually counting visitors to your store
- Electronic counting devices
- Tracking visitors on CCTV
- Implementing WiFi tracking
- Using in-store sensors to track movement through the store
- Mobile footprinting
How to Measure Retail Footfall Ratio?
The retail footfall ratio is how many shoppers you have compared to how many visitors you have in your store. To measure this, you need to divide the number of people in your store or space by the total number of transactions made.
What Is an Example of a Footfall Area?
A footfall area is known as the space that you’re counting visitors to your store. This could be the store itself, or even the street or walkway outside, where pedestrians may be passing your shop.
Is Footfall a KPI?
Footfall is a key performance indicator, as it shows how well your marketing efforts are in driving traffic to your physical location. If you are targeting users with digital out-of-home (DOOH) adverts, this can be an indication of how well your ads are performing, allowing you to work out the return on investment (ROI).
Optimize Your Ad Campaigns with Footfall Attribution
Measuring footfall traffic with footfall attribution can be a useful way to understand the effectiveness of your marketing efforts and how they influence customer behavior in physical retail spaces.
However, footfall attribution is complex, and many retail businesses prefer to partner with adtech specialists like Grapeseed Media to run, optimize, and accurately measure their ad campaigns both online and offline.
Got questions about incorporating footfall attribution into your marketing strategy? Grapeseed’s team of adtech experts is on hand to answer all of them — book a call with us for an obligation-free consultation.
If you’d like help in figuring out your footfall, download our handy guide and footfall calculator.
