To get a sense of how much time customers spent in his shopping centers, John Smith, a 1960s pioneer of the modern mall, would walk around the parking lot and feel whether car hoods felt hot or cold.
The technology for measuring foot traffic trends in brick-and-mortar stores has improved since then, but not by much. And it has been far eclipsed by online retailers, which can easily use software, such as Google Analytics, to get detailed reports about their visitors’ every click.
Now a formidable pair—John Smith’s grandson Will Smith, and Google Analytics co-creator Scott Crosby—are leading a startup that aims to bring the rigor of metrics for websites to the physical world, starting with retail stores. By picking up on the unique mobile device IDs that smartphones give off when they recognize a store’s Wi-Fi network, the company’s software can gauge typically difficult-to-track statistics, such as the percentage of passersby who enter a store, the average length of time they spend inside, and the frequency of repeat visits.
“We’re trying to make the world machine-readable,” says Crosby, who left Google in 2010 to become chief operating officer of the Palo Alto, California-based company, Euclid . “Most stores are still using clipboards and clickers,” he says.
Euclid’s technology is relatively simple. A business either installs Euclid’s sensors or, if it already is delivering Wi-Fi from one of a few major service providers, downloads software onto its network. It can then detect all consumer devices that are Wi-Fi enabled and within range of the store. As a device pings the Wi-Fi network, even if it doesn’t connect, the software collects the device’s ID. It also measures the Wi-Fi signal strength to decide whether the person carrying the device is inside or outside the door.
Just as in the online world, where traffic trends inform how a website is laid out or which products greet potential shoppers first, such data is meant to influence business decisions.
One of the company’s more than 30 customers is Philz Coffee, a popular San Francisco Bay Area coffee chain. CEO Jacob Jaber has a Euclid sensor installed in each of his 11 store locations, and checks in on the data, laid out in a style similar to a Google Analytics report, about every two weeks. He learned that customers at the University of California, Berkeley, store spend an average of 42 minutes inside. He might have guessed that they spent longer in that store than in other Philz coffeehouses, but he didn’t realize just how long. Knowing this has made him think about changing the store’s layout and furniture to make it more comfortable.
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