BlueFox Flow measures foot traffic over the course of a single day to track the consumer journey from place to place in areas like airports or malls. Following consumer walking patterns in aggregate helps marketers better understand consumer behavior and facilities managers better use public spaces.
How do mall owners value locations within their properties? Raw foot traffic is useful, and the BlueFox Count and Analyze can accurately measure traffic in multiple ways. Also interesting is the journey taken by visitors to the mall, say between anchor tenants and mall entrances / exits.
Flow characterizes foot traffic “journeys” by measuring how visitors move among N locations where a location is defined as a group of sensors. Journeys are different from “visits” because they measure the presence of visitors across groups of sensors. BlueFox customers define groups of sensors to be used in each study. Journeys comprise a powerful analytics tool for anonymous measurement of foot traffic across large spaces.
Flow measure visitor patterns in four ways:
- Transition measures the fraction of visitors who transit from one location to another. Unlike Correlation, Transition is directional. Transition generates N*(N-1) values for each period, with separate values for each direction of transition.
- Correlation measures the fraction of visitors who have visited one location that have also visited another location. Correlation is independent of direction and whether other visits have been direct or indirect. Correlation generates N*(N-1) / 2 values for each time period
Segmentation distinguishes among “shoppers”, “window shoppers”, “passersby”, and “employees” based on visit duration and closeness to the sensor. Segmentation is a powerful analytics tool and permits repeated analyses on fine-grain data using different criteria for “closeness” and dwell time.- Duration measures the duration of journeys to a collection of groups. For the time period under study, Duration measures the number of journeys that include 1 group, 2 groups, and N groups. Duration also measures the average journey duration for each of the N tranches.
Measuring the probabilities that a visitor will take a particular path can inform decisions about signage, placement of tenants, and location rents. Even the location of parking or transportation entrances can dramatically impact consumer journeys through the mall. Collecting this data over time can deliver important insights to mall (or airport or amusement park) operators.
BlueFox measures the number of visitors that arrive at each entry point (marked by a blue star) and progress to other locations, either on the interior (marked by a red dot) or the exterior (marked by a blue star). Each location measures foot traffic with its own BlueFox sensor. The more sensors employed, the finer the grain at which traffic flow is recorded.
BlueFox can deliver transition data for visualization using third-party tools. Sankey diagrams are one popular option for visualizing such data.
Another option is superimposing flow distributions on a physical map. This diagram, below, can be annotated to display the share of pedestrians that transition from one point on the map to an adjacent point.
The end result is immediate quantification of foot traffic. These measurements can be delivered for any desired timer period, whether an entire month, week, or day.
