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Dwell Time: Filtering Who's Staying in Your Shop the Longest

  • by: Edward Kennedy
  • On: 31, Oct 2017
5 min read

Have you ever wondered how long a loyal customer visits your shop? If you’re able to identify a person visiting your business as a customer, you might want to know what their average dwell time is.

If you’re curious, Bloom Intelligence Wi-Fi can offer you these answers.

Those of you who offer our Wi-Fi service to visitors are already set up to use our dashboard to gather detailed customer data. With this tool, you'll be able to determine how long they're really staying on your property.

Predicting What Customers DoImage of visitors at a coffee shop. Measure of visitor dwell time.

Wi-Fi sensor technology is a new way to predict what customers might do when they come in to your store. It enables the customer to sign in to your existing Wi-Fi network and interact with any online information you have about your business.

Meanwhile, Bloom Intelligence is going to count the person as a real customer after five minutes of being within the broadcast radius of the signal. Naturally, the customer may stay in your store for quite a while after.

Recording How Long Each Visit Is

Other services can't always detect how long someone spends in your restaurant or store. Nevertheless, some companies continue working hard to devise convenient mobile methods to track foot traffic.

Snapchat is a good example of this with their recent "Snap to Store" feature. They use a geofilter to help businesses analyze how many people visit during a given day. It works when someone shares business information to friends, allowing a business to track all visitations from those friends.

Snap to Store does have limitations, though, particularly in measuring dwell time. Foot traffic isn't always about just counting heads when they come in the door. 

Some of your customers may stay for only 30 minutes, or maybe five hours. So how can you differentiate among all these different visitation rates, especially with employees coming in as well?

Differentiating Visitors From Employees

A major challenge with measuring dwell time is being able to differentiate between a real customer and an employee. Both likely use your Wi-Fi network. So how can you tell the difference?

Bloom Intelligence can discern which person is a customer and which is an employee through evaluating the frequency of visitations over a period of weeks and months, as well as their rate of stay. Any metrics that appears to come from an employee device will be filtered out from our calculations.

This way, you'll be able to determine which devices are new visitors and how long they stay in your store.

Determining Who Stayed the Longest

So how many visitors of yours had the longest dwell times? Bloom Intelligence Wi-Fi collects all the metrics you've gathered and places it in a convenient dashboard to review in your own time.

The average dwell time of a customer can be divided further through observing individual days, weeks, months, or even all time. Reviewing the dashboard can help you determine how your marketing efforts are holding up and whether customers really respond to them.

With real-time results, you can tweak many things the same day. Some of this can involve better scheduling for your staff, or in setting up special events.

Visit us at Bloom Intelligence to learn more about Dashboard and the detailed metrics it can offer you.

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