Location Intelligence: The Tool That Turns Foot Traffic Into Strategy

NOTE: This blog is a transcript from a podcast and therefore may contain errors.

Krystal Vivian: Welcome to Digital Marketing, ROY. I’m your host, Krystal Vivian, and today I’m very excited for the conversation that we’re going to have. Think about this. What if you could see exactly how many people walked into your competitor’s location last month and where those people came from? That’s not hypothetical.

That’s something that we can actually do, and that’s what we’re talking about today. so today I am joined by our junior account manager, Megan Stinson, who is also our, lead specialist for our Location Intelligence tools. Megan, welcome to our podcast.

Megan Stinson: Thank you. I’m excited to talk through this with you today.

Krystal Vivian: I’m excited too. So Megan wears a lot of hat, she does a lot of things here as a junior account manager, but one of her tasks is working with this platform called Placer ai in order to pull these Location Intelligence reports for our clients. About themselves and about their competitors.

So, Megan, give us the elevator speech. What is Location Intelligence and what is Placer AI actually doing?

Megan Stinson: So Location Intelligence is essentially using real visitor data from different business locations. and Placer AI is gathering that information based on your location that’s turned out on your phone from 10% of the population.

So they set a perimeter around businesses and they can then track the visits into and out of that store.

Krystal Vivian: How does Placer know the difference between a customer and an employee showing up there every day? Because certainly, foot traffic is not just customers.

Megan Stinson: Yes, absolutely. So they have the ability to filter out if they’re seeing that a visitor is showing up every day regularly from nine to five, and they can filter through that and see that that person is showing up five days a week, and then they filter out those visits.

So the visitor data is truly visitors, customers, clients that are coming to the location.

Krystal Vivian: Okay. And this can track any location.

Megan Stinson: Yes. it can with a few exceptions. so we can’t do things like schools, certain medical centers, if the building is physically too small just for there to not be enough surface area.

It’s really a safety precaution just to make sure that we’re not tracking things that involve kids or, medical, facilities just for a safety measure.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah, we definitely don’t wanna. Track, there’s a lot of HIPAA potential violations. If we were tracking around medical, centers, and obviously the privacy of children is really important.

you said it’s getting 10% of the US population. Can you talk a little bit more about like how is it that they’re getting this data and sharing it with us?

Megan Stinson: most of us have a smartphone and most of us have things like the weather app or different travel apps where we have our location turned on.

So that is where they’re gathering that data from and they have access to 10% of the population, which is much larger than the usual. Usually it’s about 2 to 3%. So it’s a pretty good group of data, and that gives us even more accurate data when we’re looking at it in the platform.

Krystal Vivian: What can we see about these people that are coming in? What in kind of information does Placer AI give us about the these people?

Megan Stinson: Yeah, so I mean, obviously we can see things like, how frequently people are showing up, but as to the actual people, we can see demographics, we can see psychographics.

So we can see things specifically as what the median income is of a business and who’s visiting or whether they’re, older generations, younger generations. it gives us a lot of layers really to be able to see who specifically is coming into the business and how we can be targeting them from a marketing aspect.

Krystal Vivian: What information can we pull that isn’t demographic based, that goes beyond that?

Megan Stinson: There are a lot of things we can see. Things such as competitors, we can see where people are, other locations that are visiting. An example I like to give is dealerships like, right when you’re shopping for a car, you’re popping into a couple places. We can see that they’ve gone to other dealerships. So there’s really a wide variety of things that we can see outside of just who the person is.

Krystal Vivian: But it’s all private. Like we’re not seeing Megan Stinson walked into this car dealership, right?

Megan Stinson: Correct, yes. So there is no personal aspect of this showing. It’s basically you’re just clumped into a group. We’re not breaking it down into specific individuals. It’s all showing up as overall the population that’s coming in is either within this, income or this is the demographic, but there’s no personal level to it that’s reported.

Krystal Vivian: Okay, so it is perfectly private. we’re not tracking individual people. We’re not stalking people.

Megan Stinson: No.

Krystal Vivian: When you pull a report, a place or AI report through the platform, what kind of things are you looking at? is it metrics? Is it maps? What kind of things are we seeing?

Megan Stinson: Yeah. So yes to both of those things.

there are certain metrics that I try to look for. a big one is especially for if we’re, working with a business for the first time. Like are there visits down year over year, and how can we help grow that? we can also look at maps and we can see where your people are coming from.

Maybe you thought that they were only coming from 20 miles away, or you thought that they were coming from 50 and it might not align with that. So we really can look at a lot of different things, but those are my two favorite things to look at.

Krystal Vivian: Are you tracking typically just year over year, or what other timeframes might you be looking at? Foot traffic?

Megan Stinson: Yeah, so I think the year over year gives a good kind of. overview of what’s happening, but it’s also helpful to look either at monthly or if, there are a lot of changes seasonally then to kind of look at it things quarterly or based on those seasons.

Just kind of what makes sense for each business.

Krystal Vivian: what if I was having like a big event at my store? Is it something where I could get information about people who attended that particular event?

Megan Stinson: Yeah, absolutely. So we could narrow it down to a day or a week if we wanted to. So if we had an event going on and we wanted to see how it performed over the event the same time last year, or just in general, we can narrow it down to that specific timeframe and see how that event performed.

Krystal Vivian: Can you give me an example of, talk about a report that you recently pulled and the insights that you were able to pull from the information that you found.

Megan Stinson: Yeah, so one client in specific, they had, a lot lower visitation because of construction. So people were not able to make it into their location, and we could see that location, visits were significantly down over the previous year, which would usually have been a busy time.

So we knew in that moment that we really needed to ramp up their advertising because people weren’t going to just naturally be able to pop in. So it really was important to show up online.

Krystal Vivian: Did they make any other kind of business decisions during that time to help out with the construction issue?

I think that’s something that a lot of businesses kind of deal with usually every summer.

Megan Stinson: Yes. So they actually, this was a car dealership and they pivoted how they worked in their business a little bit and they started bringing vehicles to people to test drive. So they were able to kind of pivot and they brought the cars to the people.

Krystal Vivian: That’s a really creative way to take a problem. That is really frustrating. Yeah, like construction, which here in the Midwest, right now here in March, it’s already started by me at least. but then taking it and being able to come up with a creative solution that helps you still drive revenue even if people aren’t able to come to your store.

Megan Stinson: Yeah, absolutely. I think it gives a different lens to look at things from, to be able to make smart decisions and to make smart pivots. Definitely.

Krystal Vivian: I wanna ask about a couple of other, scenarios that aren’t necessarily specific to our clients, but things that I’m thinking of that might have different, how different businesses might use Location Intelligence.

So let’s take a credit union, for example. A credit union is opening up a branch in a new part of town or maybe a new town entirely, and they wanna grow membership at that location. How can they use Location Intelligence to understand their branch traffic, and help them achieve that goal of growing membership?

Megan Stinson: Yeah, for sure. So, I mean, this could be used before they even open that branch. but definitely after it’s opened. So we can look at up to seven competitors in one pull of a report. Obviously we can look at more than that. We can look at the area that they’re covering. So maybe they’re pulling in from areas that they’re not familiar with because they’ve not reached that before.

We can see who the people are, and kind of match their advertising and their brand message to who that person is. So there’s a lot of layers to this that we can really educate the, decisions being made.

Krystal Vivian: Could we potentially see if traffic at competitors is impacted when the new branch opens?

Megan Stinson: we could set it up and we could be tracking those competitors as well.

So we might be able to see that over time they’re getting less visitation and we can also see that people are using both locations or maybe that they started going to one and transferred over to the other.

Krystal Vivian: Let’s take another example, maybe a little bit broader, but just a client, a business is spending money on advertising and they wanna be able to tell if people are actually showing up.

And this is something that we’ve actually been talking a lot about internally with our display and our CTV ads, right? Because we can track physical visits of devices that were delivered the ad, and then they. Go through a geofence and that shows up as a physical visit.

But that is very limited because there’s a limited attribution window there. Certain locations you might not be able to geofence, things like that. How does foot traffic data help a business close the loop with? Location Intelligence, being able to have more robust data than what we might have just from a display campaign, if that makes sense.

Megan Stinson: So we can, because we can change the date ranges that we’re looking at, if we know that we started a campaign at the beginning of February and it ran for just that month, we can look at it in comparison to January, in comparison to last February. and we can see, how long people are.

Staying at the location. So maybe the problem wasn’t getting people there, it was keeping them there. So did that increase, there’s really a good, set of options to be able to tell, not only are more people showing up, but is the quality of the traffic increasing?

Krystal Vivian: Oh, that’s really interesting.

You mentioned before about how we can use Location Intelligence to show where visitors are coming from before they show up to a particular business, right? How do we use that, You are also, in addition to being our resident in-house Location Intelligence expert, you are also a campaign manager, which means that you are building campaigns for clients.

You are setting up the geofencing list, you’re setting up display ads, you’re setting up CTV, you’re managing an optimizing all of these campaigns. Can you talk a little bit more about how we use Location Intelligence or could use Location Intelligence to build targeting for something like a geo-fencing campaign or a display ad?

Megan Stinson: Yeah, absolutely. So we have used this in a small handful of instances. I actually was working on a campaign and we wanted to know if we could reach into another city. So I was able to pull a placer look at the visitation trends where people are coming from, and be able to make an informed recommendation that yes, it did make sense to push her advertising into that extra area based on what the data was showing.

Krystal Vivian: Is this something that a business needs a big budget for?

Megan Stinson: No. So because of how we function, that’s something that we can, use somewhat internally, but it also is something that we can offer as a service. So if it’s something that you want to have your eyes on each month, it’s a fairly affordable investment, and then we can give you both the data and notes on how to use that moving forward.

Krystal Vivian: If a business owner, or a marketing manager was interested in using Location Intelligence to inform these decisions or understand more about the foot traffic, is there anything that they need to keep in mind before they get started using it?

Megan Stinson: I would say the biggest thing to keep in mind is that this is a layer, right?

So there are so many moving pieces. There are so many factors to why there could be a change in visitation, but this is raw data that can help inform other decisions. But it doesn’t need to be the end all, be all of what makes those decisions happen.

Krystal Vivian: What’s your favorite part of Placer? Because you are the one digging in, you’re the one pulling the reports and seeing all of these things.

What do you find most interesting or most compelling about this tool and about the information that you’re able to get?

Megan Stinson: Yeah, I think for me it kind of feels like I get a bird’s eye view of what’s happening with some of these businesses. So there might be things that they’re not even aware of.

so it’s just a cool snapshot of what’s going on and when we are working with them, what we’re doing and how that’s impacting the business.

Krystal Vivian: That’s awesome. I think it’s really cool. I am not a math person. But I am an information person.

Megan Stinson: Yes. Yes.

Krystal Vivian: Sometimes the reporting that we do, it’s a lot of numbers.

Megan Stinson: Yep.

Krystal Vivian: and this is a lot of information. And so for me it’s like, like teases my brain a little bit and it’s like, Ooh, this is cool. And like, what could we do with all of this?

Megan Stinson: And I think, the fun part of it as well is it’s creating a story based on the numbers, right? Like I am a math person, but numbers are just numbers if you don’t know what to do with them.

And so being able to work with the rest of the team, you know, when we’re trying to solve a problem or trying to, consider how we can use this, it’s just building that story and being able to tell that to our clients.

Krystal Vivian: all right, well, we always like to end every episode of Digital Marketing RoWHY, with the whole point of our podcast, which is Return on Investment.

Right? So what would you say is the ROI of Location Intelligence for businesses?

Megan Stinson: Yeah. I think really the biggest thing is that this is another layer of data that you can base business decisions off of, whether that be marketing, whether that be other things going on in your business. you’ll have more data about your foot traffic, your competitors’ foot traffic, and just be able to create a more robust and strategic marketing plan, business plan, whatever it may be.

But it’s just a really great tool to enhance your business.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah. I think that’s really cool and being able to come up with some of those creative solutions like the car dealership that you talked about earlier, and how they pivoted mid construction season to continue being able to sell cars.

Megan Stinson: Yep, absolutely.

Yeah, it’s another way to get info and be able to move your business forward.

Krystal Vivian: I love that. thank you so much for joining us today.

Megan Stinson: Thank you for inviting me to do this with you.

Krystal Vivian: Yeah, absolutely. Happy to do it.

That is it for today’s episode of Digital Marketing ROWhy? Thank you, Megan.

Megan Stinson: Thank you so much.

Krystal Vivian: And thank you to our listeners. We’ll talk to you next time on Digital Marketing, ROWhy?.

 

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