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malls track shopper's cell phone signals to gather marketing data
Online retailers have long gathered behavioral metrics about how customers shop, tracking their movements through e-shopping pages and using data to make targeted offers based on user profiles. Retailers in meat-space have had tried to replicate that with frequent shopper offers, store credit cards, and other ways to get shoppers to voluntarily give up data on their behavior, but these efforts have lacked the sort of data capacity provided by anonymous store browsers—at least until now. This holiday season, shopping malls in the US have started collecting data about shoppers by tracking the closest thing to "cookies" human beings carry—their cell phones.
The technology, from Portsmouth, England based Path Intelligence, is called Footpath. It uses monitoring units distributed throughout a mall or retail environment to sense the movement of customers by triangulation, using the strength of their cell phone signals. That data is collected and run through analytics by Path, and provided back to retailers through a secure website.
On March 31, Path CEO Sharon Biggar presented the tech at the ICSC Fusion conference in Los Angeles. She discussed how data collected by Footpath could be used by retailers to boost revenue. Options include tracking response to mailers and other advertising by providing the equivalent of web metrics like unique visitors, "page impressions" (measuring how many people walked past a display or advertisement), and "click-through" (determining how many people who passed an advertisement then visited the store associated with it). "Now we can produce heat maps of the mall and show advertisers where the premium locations are for their adverts," she said, "and perhaps more importantly we can price the advertising differently at each location."
In the US, Footpath is being trailed in two malls by Forest City, a mall real estate company that owns malls and shopping centers nationwide. Promenade Temecula in Temecula, California, and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Virginia are the sites of choice; the trial starts today, and will run through New Years. In a written statement, Forest City's spokesperson Lindsey Cottone said that Forest City was being "totally transparent" about the trial, posting signage to "inform customers that the survey is taking place."
Online retailers have long gathered behavioral metrics about how customers shop, tracking their movements through e-shopping pages and using data to make targeted offers based on user profiles. Retailers in meat-space have had tried to replicate that with frequent shopper offers, store credit cards, and other ways to get shoppers to voluntarily give up data on their behavior, but these efforts have lacked the sort of data capacity provided by anonymous store browsers—at least until now. This holiday season, shopping malls in the US have started collecting data about shoppers by tracking the closest thing to "cookies" human beings carry—their cell phones.
The technology, from Portsmouth, England based Path Intelligence, is called Footpath. It uses monitoring units distributed throughout a mall or retail environment to sense the movement of customers by triangulation, using the strength of their cell phone signals. That data is collected and run through analytics by Path, and provided back to retailers through a secure website.
On March 31, Path CEO Sharon Biggar presented the tech at the ICSC Fusion conference in Los Angeles. She discussed how data collected by Footpath could be used by retailers to boost revenue. Options include tracking response to mailers and other advertising by providing the equivalent of web metrics like unique visitors, "page impressions" (measuring how many people walked past a display or advertisement), and "click-through" (determining how many people who passed an advertisement then visited the store associated with it). "Now we can produce heat maps of the mall and show advertisers where the premium locations are for their adverts," she said, "and perhaps more importantly we can price the advertising differently at each location."
In the US, Footpath is being trailed in two malls by Forest City, a mall real estate company that owns malls and shopping centers nationwide. Promenade Temecula in Temecula, California, and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Virginia are the sites of choice; the trial starts today, and will run through New Years. In a written statement, Forest City's spokesperson Lindsey Cottone said that Forest City was being "totally transparent" about the trial, posting signage to "inform customers that the survey is taking place."
