Retail foot traffic is the number of people visiting a physical retail location over a defined period. It is the offline equivalent of website traffic: a measure of how many people a store actually reaches, and the denominator behind conversion, dwell and catchment analysis.
How it is measured
There are three broad approaches, and they measure subtly different things.
- Door counters and sensors — accurate for a single entrance, but blind to anything beyond it and costly to deploy across an estate.
- Wi-Fi and Bluetooth sensing — wider coverage, but dependent on devices having radios enabled and increasingly limited by MAC address randomisation.
- Anonymised mobile location data — measures a panel rather than everyone, then extrapolates. It works across any location without hardware, which is what makes competitor and market-wide benchmarking possible.
Visits are not the same as passers-by
A credible foot traffic figure applies a dwell-time threshold, so someone walking past is not counted as a visitor. It also depends on an accurate point of interest boundary: a polygon that overlaps a neighbouring unit or a car park will attribute visits that never happened.
What it is used for
Site selection and catchment analysis, benchmarking against competitors, measuring the impact of refits or openings, and attributing advertising to real-world visits.
Related: location data for retail and real estate.
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