Location Analytics is the ability to gain business insights from the location — geographic component of business data. Multiple types of business insights are possible as well as multiple ways of obtaining them. This article describes how to gain highly actionable insights from standard street cameras, in order to explore the possible future location of your business from a micro view.
Location analytics is often a visual way of interpreting and analysing the information being portrayed by the data when used in conjunction with a geographical information system.
There is a growing awareness that by adding geographic location to business data and mapping it, organizations can dramatically enhance their insights into tabular data. Maps and spatial analytics provide a whole new context that is simply not possible with tables and charts. This context can almost immediately help users discover new understandings and more effectively communicate and collaborate using maps as a common language. While this geographic aspect has been largely absent from business analytics solutions, many organizations would like to incorporate it into their operations.
Creating interactive maps of the shopper traffic in the location inside existing business systems can help users see patterns that graphs and charts cannot reveal.
Your gut feeling can tell you a million reasons why one location is better than another. But at the end of the day, you want to know one thing: Which spot will bring more customers to my business? Foot traffic is the number of people passing by your business on a given day. Measuring this gives you an estimate of how many customers a potential location can bring and thus helps you to choose the ideal spot.
Nearly all businesses rely on foot traffic to some extent. For retailers, it can account for most of their sales. For restaurants, salons, and other services, the visibility they get from a high-traffic location can easily be their number one advertising source. Needless to say, foot traffic is an extremely important factor when choosing a location. Having this data at hand allows you to make informed decisions, especially when you’re comparing multiple locations or negotiating rent.
What is a good foot traffic count? For most urban commercial areas, expect a count of at least a few thousand pedestrians daily. Anything lower is probably a more secluded commercial, residential or industrial area.
Modern video analytical systems like the one from GoodVision are capable of extracting every possible aspect of pedestrian and other traffic movements within the monitored area. Today it is definitely not just about the counts, you can measure:
You can use the data obtained in the previous step for various aspects of your business — when you are looking for a new business spot or when you want to analyse the performance of your current business location:
You might have already experienced the following scenario: location #1 with expensive rent, but huge traffic count versus location #2 with standard rent and lower pedestrian traffic. Which location is worth money to choose?
To find the answer, you have to estimate how many sales will result from the better location. Here are the hints:
Here you might have some concerns, because data from street cameras do not lay on the floor just like that right?
Can you imagine analysed data reports from yesterday’s traffic, from all your locations, awaiting you at your desk like a morning newspaper? That’s what GoodVision is for.