Why count your visitors?

The Conversion Rate

As a retailer with more than one store, you have an ideal opportunity to improve sales at your lower-performing stores, raising them to the level of the better stores. You can start the improvements as soon as you have established the buyer/browser benchmark among your stores, i.e. what proportion of visitors are converted into sales. You cannot make proper improvements without this benchmark, and no benchmark will be clear without an accurate count of your visitors. Once you have the benchmark you can distinguish the weak from the strong performers and apply the benchmark as a tool for driving the weak ones to success. You accomplish this by training, adding people to the team, and - most importantly - clarifying the goals to be matched, which motivates and is necessary for improvements to take place.

A typical buyer/browser ratio can be 15-20%. By improving the ratio of a poorly performing store by only a few percentage points, you create a dramatic increase in sales. As an example, a 3% improvement in the buyer/ browser ratio from 12-15% means a 25% sales increase. While you improve your personnel's sales skills only slightly, you do so permanently, which means the improvements will continue to work for you throughout the millions of minutes that visitors spend in your store every year.

Additionally, you can use your visitor-count numbers to:

• Plan staffing within each day and among days, months and high seasons (sales or Christmas)
• Determine opening hours
• Negotiate rent in shopping-centre locations
• Estimate the effectiveness of marketing efforts and promotions in attracting visitors to your store, which will help you to:
  • Determine which marketing efforts to emphasize
  • Fine-tune the level of advertising with the number and ability of employees on the floor

And if you manage a shopping centre you can do all of the above plus:

• Negotiate rent based on the visitors passing by or entering a store
• Plan staffing and the optimum times for
  • Cleaning
  • Maintenance
  • Security surveillance
• React to emergencies through real-time customer counts inside the mall
• Analyze the flow of people through individual entrances, car parks etc.

There are two things you must consider when choosing a people-counting firm as your partner:

• Capacity to deliver accurate visitor data
• Capability of converting the data into valuable information

Data is not the same as valuable information - not until you process it correctly and communicate it to the appropriate people in a meaningful way.

A discrete camera is placed above some entry point.

• Visitors are distinguished from the background (such as the floor).
• Peocon's proprietary software traces visitors through separated,
• pre-defined zones in the picture.
• Direction and speed are analyzed, reading up to 20 frames per second.
  • Visitors walking back and forth within the image are not counted until they disappear from it.
  • When visitors enter in groups they usually separate sufficiently before exiting the picture. If not, probability methods are applied in order to reach conclusions.

The result is immediate data with an unmatched 97% accuracy.

Customers can access the entire data in real time both on their local Intranet and the Internet.

• Multiple means of analyzing the information online
• Personalized consulting and assistance with interpretation
• Standardized reports sent monthly by e-mail
• Option of printing out and exporting data to spreadsheets
• Varied access levels allowing different categories of managers to view their own types of data.

Retail chains and shopping centers can choose four types of Peocon products, all of which they can access online through a customized web interface.

Counts visitors and presents information through a customized, online interface:

• Number of visitors entering and exiting
  • Trends through time, between shifts, and among shops and types of shops
  • Distribution during the day
  • Differences among entrances (if many)
  • Average time inside
• Optional exporting of the figures to a spreadsheet and manual comparison with sales

peoManager^TM

Same as Peocounter plus a connection to your internal back office system. Basic calculations in the system (listing example figures):

• Number of visitors (600)
• Value of the day's sales (Rs. 5,00,000)
• Number of the day's sales (100)
• Square meters (200)
• Number of staff (6)

You receive, in this example, the following ratios for comparison in time, among shops etc.

Sales / visitors – how many end up buying - the CONVERSION RATE: 16%
Turnover / square metres – use of floor space: €25
Turnover / employees - daily value of each employee: €833
Sales / employees - daily output of each employee: 16,6
Turnover / sales - average amount per sale: €50
Visitors / employees - pressure on staff: 100 per day
Turnover / visitors – value of each visitor: €8,33

peoFlow^TM

Same as Peocounter, along with the possibility of mapping in detail the flow of people through your shopping centre or retail outlet.

• Compare how many pass by your store with how many enter
• Estimate the effect of assorted window displays
• Detect walking speed and direction, if desired
• In department stores and larger shops, chart the flow between departments and the effectiveness of varying in-store promotions

peoanalyst^TM

Same as PeoManager, with added external information Advertising statistics

• Examines correlations between ads, visitors and sales, helping to fine-tune advertisement expenditures
• Scanning data (ACNielsen, Gallup, IMG)
• Weather information
• Enables the comparison of previous visitor counts on sunny/rainy days with the current weather forecast, assisting in staff planning etc.
• Statistics on inside and outside parking lots according to weather
• Consumer behavior / consumer research
• Where your visitors live, their age, gender, etc.