Mastering Offline Visitor Tracking: A Comprehensive Solution Guide

Transparency Market Research, an international analyst company, predicts that the market for software products for analyzing foot traffic and customer location will reach $9 billion. This reflects a cumulative annual growth rate of approximately 6%.

This trend can be explained by entrepreneurs' desire to differentiate themselves from competitors, enhance customer service, and increase the efficiency of their businesses, in short, maximize their income.

In this article, AdvantISS experts will share their own experience in developing such a solution and help you understand how analyzing visitor traffic can optimize your business.

Business Sectors That Benefit from Visitor Traffic Solutions

When discussing software products for tracking visitor traffic, retail chains, and department stores are the first to come to mind.

However, the range of business sectors interested in utilizing digital solutions for analyzing foot traffic and customer location is quite extensive. Let's briefly delve into each of these sectors.

• Shopping malls: Based on statistics provided by Gitnux, a resource specializing in management, the average daily foot traffic in regional shopping centers, even not the largest ones, can range from 5,000 to 15,000 customers. Approximately 60% of them spend at least three hours in stores. It makes perfect sense for retailers to maximize this time for their benefit. Visitor traffic solutions can help track customer behavior, offer current promotions, optimize the product range, replenish inventory promptly, adjust operating hours, and more.

• Hotels and Resorts: A survey by HotelTechReport found that 81% of hotel owners who participated believe that the future of a successful hotel business lies in technological innovations. AI-powered visitor traffic solutions allow tracking of the demand for hotel services and other patterns, enabling hotel owners to adjust staffing levels, offer additional services, and more.
• Theaters, cinemas, stadiums, and exhibition centers: These venues host large gatherings that require efficient management. Software products for analyzing foot traffic allow tracking event attendance, making forecasts for future events, determining their ratings, and using this information to maximize visitor satisfaction.

• Airports and transportation hubs: In airports and other transportation companies, all operations must run smoothly, like a well-oiled machine. It's necessary to minimize passenger waiting times, ensure timely baggage checks, and coordinate passenger flows. Considering that, according to Statista, the average passenger flow in U.S. airports exceeds 2 million people per day, achieving all these goals without specialized software products would be very challenging.

• Educational institutions, such as universities and schools: Digital solutions for analyzing foot traffic and student location allow educational institutions to have up-to-date data on student attendance and their involvement in various activities. Awareness of individuals on school or university premises is also crucial for ensuring student safety.

Tech Stack and Stages of Creating the Best Visitors Traffic Solutions

Developing modern digital solutions for tracking visitors is only achievable through the application of cutting-edge technologies. One of the leading developers, AdvantISS, has provided a clear definition of how such products work:

"The system uses a combination of IoT devices (surveillance cameras), peripheral computing nodes for real-time processing, and cloud servers for data storage and further analysis. Cameras capture video, and peripheral nodes process it in real-time to provide quick information, and then send it to the cloud for long-term storage and deeper analysis."

Let's take a closer look at the technological solutions that are effectively utilized in the creation of visitor traffic solutions:

1. YOLO Algorithm: "You Only Look Once." This algorithm operates on the principle that the entire image undergoes a single pass through a neural network, ensuring lightning-fast object detection.

1. Embedded deep learning technologies: The deep learning market was estimated at $12.67 billion in 2022, and it is projected to grow to $188.58 billion by 2030. Such impressive growth indicates the high efficiency of this technology. In the context of visitor traffic solutions, the utilization of deep learning enables not only the tracking of visitor traffic but also automatic counting and analysis of people's behavior.

1. Kalman filters and Hungarian algorithms: These technologies are used for the seamless tracking of people over short periods with various camera image parameters.

1. Neural networks for facial recognition: Among popular solutions, ResNet, VGG, and FaceNet stand out, as they enable highly accurate facial recognition.

After choosing the optimal tech stack, the next important task is planning the stages of creating an AI-powered monitoring system for optimizing customer flow. Let's outline the key stages:

1. Gathering requirements and defining the project scope: This may involve seminars for clients, and teams may need to visit locations where visitor traffic needs to be tracked and analyze historical data.
2. Camera placement and installation: Choosing the right camera locations is crucial for accurate data. If your goal is to monitor the attendance of your educational institution, installing a camera at the entrance to the building may suffice. However, if you want to track shopper movements in a shopping center or optimize passenger flows at an airport, you'll need many more cameras.
3. Integration of peripheral nodes and configuration of cloud infrastructure: The rapid development of IoT technology drives the use of peripheral nodes. These devices generate vast amounts of data, and directly transmitting it to data centers takes too much time. However, utilizing peripheral nodes doesn't mean abandoning cloud computing. Data from these nodes is subsequently sent to the cloud for storage and analysis.
4. Training and deploying ML models: Machine learning algorithms are trained based on historical data to identify patterns that influence traffic flows. This enables real-time detection of similar patterns and their use for highly accurate consumer behavior prediction.
5. Integration of APIs for customer access: Even though a development company supports the product from its conception to full implementation, all the information obtained through it must be available to the customer. This could be a retail space tenant, an educational institution manager, a cinema owner, or any other client of the digital solution.
6. Testing and optimization: Naturally, before presenting the final visitor traffic solution and delivering the order to the client, thorough testing of the digital solution is carried out, and improvements are made as necessary.

When creating such a software product, certain challenges may arise. AdvantISS experts are not afraid to discuss them, as they are confident in their ability to overcome any obstacles on the path to creating a high-quality digital solution.

"The main problems that arise during the development of visitors traffic solutions are related to integration with existing company systems, ensuring real-time data processing capabilities, and data confidentiality."

AdvantISSs Expertise in Developing Visitor Traffic Solutions for a Real Estate Agency

AdvantISS specializes in developing digital solutions for analyzing foot traffic and customer location.

The project was implemented for a real estate agency specializing in managing shopping centers.

Our task was to create an AI-powered digital solution aimed at managing customer flows and, in turn, enhancing business efficiency.

During the project, we created the digital product AI Surveillance for Customer Flow Optimization, a complex system based on artificial intelligence with all the necessary functions and features:

1. Real-Time People Counting and Occupancy Tracking. This feature enabled shopping center managers to efficiently allocate staff and prevent overcrowding.

1. Point of Interest (POI) and Route Analysis. Tracking the interests and routes of shopping center visitors helps avoid overcrowding in specific stores or food court areas, increasing customer satisfaction.
2. Stay Duration Analysis and Anomaly Detection. Understanding visitor behavior characteristics contributes to enhancing security measures in public places.

1. Integration with Existing Systems and Weather Data. This feature enabled us to consider various external factors when predicting visitor behavior, such as weather conditions.

1. Scalable and Upgradable Solution. By ensuring the easy scalability of our product, we provided our client with the flexibility to apply it to shopping centers of varying sizes.

1. Data Management and Predictive Analytics. In the case of AI Surveillance for Customer Flow Optimization, it not only facilitated the tracking of visitor behavior but also enabled accurate predictions of future event scenarios.

1. Ensuring Safety and Compliance. With our solution, we effectively maintained a delicate balance between tracking visitors and safeguarding personal data privacy.

1. Customer Engagement and Emergency Response. In the highly competitive offline retail market, the level of customer service is one of the crucial factors in retaining clients. Thanks to our product, shopping center administrations can promptly respond to emergencies, ensure customer safety, and meet their needs to the fullest.

As per feedback from our client, the utilization of the product developed by the AdvantISS team resulted in the following benefits:

• Reduced customer waiting times by 10-30%.
• Enhanced space utilization efficiency by 10-20%.
• Decreased energy consumption and personnel costs by 5-15%.

Summarizing

AI-powered digital solutions for analyzing foot traffic and customer location are indispensable for businesses dealing with substantial customer traffic.

These products empower businesses to:

• streamline staffing,
• enhance building layouts,
• replenish high-demand products,
• provide current promotions,
• and more :)