The other 180°: Filling in the other half of the 360° customer view

Abstract

Compared with the digital experience, the shopper in-store journey has traditionally been under-measured. Stores know how many shoppers they get (door-counting) and what they have sold (point-of-sale). What happens in between, however, has long been a mystery. Thanks to new technologies such as camera-tracking, Wi-Fi geolocation and mobile app location, however, the in-store shopper journey is becoming increasingly trackable. This paper looks at the basics of shopper measurement: what gets tracked and what the data look like. It then reviews the core collection technologies with attention to their strengths and weaknesses, relative to specific business use cases. This is followed by an overview of the various metrics that can be inferred from the data: everything from draws to lingers to exits. Metrics provide a language for describing the data in intelligible terms, and the in-store journey requires a new language — although it is one that has been heavily adapted from digital analytics. Finally, some key use cases for such data are considered, allowing the analyst to go from the basics of collection to data aggregation and translation, and finally to real analysis.