Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Understanding how people move through your business is crucial for improving operations, optimizing customer experience, and ensuring safety. Traditional security systems often overlook valuable insights hidden in your video feeds, that’s where AI-powered people counting and footfall data, also known as foot traffic data solutions come in.
With Solink’s AI video analytics, you can do more than just monitor security. By seamlessly integrating with your existing cameras, Solink enables you to track customer movement, analyze foot traffic patterns, and gain valuable data that can drive operational improvements, boost sales, and enhance safety protocols—all in real time. Whether you’re managing a retail store, restaurant, or large venue, these insights can help you make informed decisions and unlock new business opportunities.
Explore how AI-driven people counting and foot traffic solutions can transform your business—providing both security and actionable intelligence for every team.
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What is footfall?
Footfall data, also known as foot traffic or people counting, refers to the number of people entering and leaving a building (usually a retail outlet or shop) during a particular time frame.
It might seem like a strange thing to track—if you’re busy, you’re busy, and if you’re quiet, you’re quiet, right? However, digging deeper to understand footfalls can offer valuable, actionable insights to improve the bottom line of your business.
People counting vs. traffic counting
People counting and traffic counting are very similar concepts. Here are the definitions of people counting and traffic counting from the Solink Glossary:
- People counting, or footfall counting, is counting the number of people, usually with automated technology such as AI cameras or turnstiles, entering or exiting a location to understand things like conversion rates or the effectiveness of your advertising.
- Traffic counting is recording the number of vehicles, usually with automated technology such as AI cameras, entering or exiting a location to understand things like conversion rates or drive-thru speed of service.
Essentially, traffic counting is the same process as people counting but for cars. For a quick service restaurant (QSR) with a drive-thru, both people counting and traffic counting are important.
Understanding the importance of people counting and foot traffic data
People counting and foot traffic data are vital tools for optimizing business operations and improving customer experience, but their true potential is unlocked when integrated with point-of-sale (POS) data. Solink’s AI-powered analytics combine foot traffic metrics with POS information, allowing businesses to track conversion rates and better understand how customer movement impacts sales. See below some of the data and analytics that can be captured:
Conversion rates
Conversion rates tell you what percentage of a population performed the action you want them to. For many businesses, a conversion can be defined as a visitor making a purchase. By tracking footfalls, you can see which percentage of people entering your business convert into a paying customer.
Speed of service
Speed of service is a critical metric as faster service means more orders processed per hour. That directly leads to higher revenue but also can mean more repeat customers. Faster service leads to better customer experience, and a better customer experience should result in more repeat business.
Many restaurants measure speed of service from the moment a customer orders, in-house or through the drive-thru, until the food is served and the bill is closed. However, people counting in-house and traffic counting in the drive-thru can allow you measure the full cycle speed of service from when a person arrives at your restaurant until they leave.
Average duration of visit
Restaurants usually have a good idea of the average revenue per visitor. However, bars and clubs where multiple bills are opened over a night by the same person or stores where not every visitor makes a purchase have a harder time understanding this important metric.
Footfall data helps businesses understand the average value of a visitor. This for example can give you insight into the effectiveness of your sales staff. If the value goes down, it might indicate your salespeople are being too passive and more people are leaving your store without making a purchase.
Heat maps and zone counting
Heatmaps and zone counting can demonstrate the typical occupancy of certain areas at any given time of day. This can help improve your sales.
Putting people counting or footfall traffic data to work for you
Footfall data can inform a variety of business-related improvements, spanning everything from staffing to operations to marketing:
- Understand a location: People counting can inform how busy an area might be. As an example, this can be highly insightful information for malls providing traffic data to potential lenders.
- Enhance planning: Demand for business in many services may fluctuate dramatically. Retail, for example, sees regular spikes around the Christmas holiday period. The data generated by people counting can offer vital insights for anticipating seasonal changes in demand and planning marketing strategies accordingly.
- Manage occupancy capacity: Especially for popular bars and clubs, fire regulation capacity limits are important to enforce. Footfall counting technology can help protect you from expensive fines or nights missed from temporary closures.
- Strengthen loss prevention: Utilizing people counting technology throughout your business can help keep track of where people are going and how many people are in your business. This can help improve your loss prevention system.
- Locate shoplifters: When something goes missing within your store, using people counting security cameras to match foot traffic with video evidence of the product being removed from the shelf can help you spot shoplifters.
- Improve inventory management: Knowing how foot traffic in your business is changing day to day or even hour to hour can help you order better. You can use that information to order more or less based on real-time demand.
- Get a handle on organized retail crime (ORC): ORC raids are becoming a major part of retail theft. Counting footfalls can help you monitor the surges in foot traffic that can precede an ORC theft event. This is one of the ways to prevent external theft.
- Market more effectively: Using heatmaps and zone counting, companies may make informed decisions. Testing and determining where best to position their promotional and marketing materials using footfall data can help to maximize sales.
- Discover low- and high-demand hours: Optimize the number of staff during both busy and quiet periods to boost cost efficiency. You can also integrate footfall data into your exception-based reporting process to find unusually busy or quiet periods or troubling trends.
- Confirm all guests have paid: You can measure your sales numbers versus footfalls to confirm that fees are being collected from all guests. For example, a golf course can use people counting to make sure green fees are being paid by all golfers.
Few of these benefits will be realized overnight. To use footfall data effectively, it must be gathered over time.
Who might benefit from people counting or footfall traffic analysis?
Retail
A camera focused on the door connected to Solink’s platform can be used to count footfalls. Retail is one industry that stands to benefit significantly from footfall data through better understanding of customer demands, trends, and behaviors.
Using footfall insights, offerings and services can be adapted and reimagined to ensure the provision of an improved customer experience, optimized marketing efforts, maximized cost savings, bolstered sales, and more. Indeed, the benefits to be garnered from footfall systems align with the four key retail trends identified by KPMG in 2020.
Restaurants
The major benefit of tracking footfalls for restaurants is improved staffing. In the long term, knowing the daily and weekly traffic trends can allow for better scheduling, which improves profitability. In the short term, registering sudden spikes in footfalls can be an indicator that the manager should try to call in more workers for a heavier than anticipated dinner rush.
Automobile dealerships
Dealerships benefit from both people counting and traffic counting. Improving the time it takes for a salesperson to first interact with customers is one way that people counting can improve customer experience at a dealership. It could also help with merchandising by testing which cars at the front of the lot or in the showroom windows improves the number of footfalls.
Convenience stores
Convenience stores can use footfall data to make decisions about staffing or even hours of operation. If the convenience store has an attached gas station, then knowing the prevailing traffic levels can aid in decisions on expanding the number of pumps.
Hospitality
Hotels can better manage scheduling based on their footfall data. If there are swing staff members, reacting to sudden changes in footfalls through the main doors can get guests checked in and out more quickly.
Financial institutions
Busy ATMs can make patrons uncomfortable. They need to type in a secret code and handle money, which can be nerve-wracking when there is a line up of people waiting. For the financial institution, that long line could result in people giving up and using a different ATM.
Tracking footfalls can help banks and credit unions place the right number of ATMs in the right locations with the right amount of cash inside to better serve their customers.
Similarly, branch services can be optimized based on footfall trends. Scheduling the right number of tellers throughout the week leads to both better customer service during peak hours and reduced labor costs caused by too many tellers working during off hours.
Implementing people counting solutions in a business
Introducing people counting solutions into your business doesn’t have to mean overhauling your current system. With Solink’s AI-powered video analytics, you can utilize your existing cameras to implement powerful people counting features—no need for expensive hardware upgrades or complicated installations.
Your current cameras can become your people counting devices – simply through Solink’s platform/software.
Solink’s solution works seamlessly with your current security setup, transforming your video feeds into valuable data. By combining foot traffic metrics with point-of-sale (POS) data, you gain insights into customer behavior and conversion rates, all while keeping your existing infrastructure intact. This allows you to track how many visitors become paying customers, identify busy times, and optimize staffing and store layout for maximum efficiency and sales.
Choosing the right solution for your needs
When choosing the right solution, consider the following:
- Accuracy: How reliable is the system at counting people and eliminating false positives? Solink’s AI-powered video analytics excels in accuracy by only counting individuals who fully cross designated lines, ignoring those who are near or straddling the threshold but don’t actually commit to crossing. This eliminates miscounts, such as mistakenly identifying inanimate objects or pets as people. Solink’s high precision ensures you get the most accurate foot traffic data available.
- Scalability: Can the solution grow with your business? Solink’s flexible platform allows you to scale effortlessly across multiple locations, giving you comprehensive insights from a single dashboard.
- Data Integration: Does the solution combine foot traffic data with POS data for actionable insights? Solink seamlessly merges both, helping you track conversion rates, monitor sales performance, and optimize operations.
- Ease of Implementation: Solink offers quick and easy setup with zero hardware upgrades required, making it a cost-effective solution for businesses looking to implement people counting without disruption.
Future trends in AI-powered foot traffic analysis
As these trends emerge, AI-powered foot traffic analysis will continue to be a key driver of business intelligence, helping companies make smarter decisions faster. Solink’s technology ensures that businesses are well-positioned to take advantage of these advancements, providing a seamless solution for tracking, analyzing, and acting on foot traffic data.
People counting and footfall traffic FAQ's
What are people counters or footfalls?
Footfalls are a measure of walking traffic in a location. Footfalls indicate the number of people walking by a location or entering a business.
How do people counters work?
There are many different types of footfall counters, including sensors, turnstiles, and cameras. They all work in different ways but follow the same principle. They count every time a person walks by the measured location.
How can I increase footfalls?
Increasing the number of footfalls requires increasing the number of people entering a location. There are many ways to increase the number of footfalls to your location, but they are all under the umbrella of marketing.
What does people counting and footfall analytics allow you to do?
Footfall analytics helps physical locations measure key business metrics. Here are just five types of metrics that footfalls can help brick-and-mortar businesses measure:
- Conversion rates
- Speed of service
- Average revenue per visitor
- Average duration of visit
- Heatmaps and zone counting
Why is footfall analysis important?
Footfall analysis gives businesses insight into how they are performing. Footfalls can tell businesses about their revenue generation and customer service quality, among many other things.
What can store managers do with people counting data?
Store managers can learn a lot about staffing through the use of people counting. Store managers can identify training needs, know when they may need to ask more employees to come in, and write better schedules.
What can area managers do with footfall data?
Area managers can measure how their locations are doing with footfall data. It is possible to see not just revenue trends but also why those trends are occurring. Area managers can also improve merchandising and ordering with the help of people and traffic counting.
What can the head office do with footfall data?
Head office can learn a lot about the quality of locations using footfall data. People and traffic counting can help make decisions about which locations to close or where new locations should be sited.
Headoffice can also improve loss prevention systems by recognizing unusual footfall data that may indicate organized retail crime (ORC) raids.
How should I perform people counting?
There are many different people counting systems, including sensors, turnstiles, and cameras. If your business already has security cameras, then camera-based footfall data collection is a cost effective and discreet people counting solution.
How does a camera count people?
Solink can count footfalls using security cameras. Artificial intelligence (AI) is used to measure motion through a business to count people entering and exiting a location.
How do you collect traffic data?
Solink can perform traffic counting using security cameras. Artificial intelligence (AI) is used to measure motion outside a business to count cars going through a specified area.
Book a demo to learn more about how Solink’s AI can help you stay ahead of security threats.
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