How to Increase Foot Traffic: Measure and Boost Store Visits

Foot traffic describes how many people visit your retail store. It’s an essential part of retail analytics—footfall can indicate trends in customer behavior, help boost sales for a particular product through smarter positioning, and drive online shoppers towards your store to receive a more personalized experience from retail staff. 

But the real question is: how do you get more passersby to actually enter your store? And how do you run a foot traffic analysis to determine whether your strategy is working? 

Keep reading to learn how to count, track, and analyze foot traffic trends, and discover tools that make it easier than ever—no counters or spreadsheets required.

What is foot traffic in retail?

Foot traffic in retail is the number of customers who enter your store. Foot traffic numbers can either be monitored manually by using counters, or digitally using cameras and retail tracking software. 

There are several factors that can impact your store’s foot traffic, most notably where it’s located. Is your store in an area where your target customer lives or frequently visits? Are there other nearby businesses or restaurants that attract customers who are also part of your target market? 

💡 Tip: If you want to test foot traffic before committing to leasing a commercial space, consider opening a popup shop first to test the area. To open a popup shop and start selling with Shopify, go to your Shopify Admin, click the plus icon next to “Sales channels,” and select Point of Sale.

Why foot traffic is a key retail metric

The more foot traffic data you have to interpret, the better equipped you are to spot patterns, measure your store’s performance, and make cost-effective decisions around labor and marketing.

For instance, you can determine what your store’s busiest days are based on both total sales and foot traffic and plan your staff schedule accordingly. You can also get more insight into how external factors (like weather) or your latest marketing activations and promotions impact foot traffic. 

But perhaps most importantly, you can measure foot traffic levels next to the total number of orders you processed to see if your staff are turning opportunities into sales. 

The strategic benefits of tracking foot traffic

The benefits of tracking foot traffic work together to improve overall store performance through:

• Extra customer insight: By tracking foot traffic, you’ll get a better understanding of your customers and their buying patterns. 
• Optimized staffing: Foot traffic data helps you schedule more staff during peak shopping hours and reduce staff during slow periods, to decrease unnecessary operational costs.
• Improve product assortment and inventory planning: Some foot-traffic-tracking software has heatmap features that help you understand how customers move around your store. Use this to optimize space, improve your store layout, and increase sales with strategic product placement. 
• Marketing optimization: By tracking foot traffic on the day of a promotion, you’ll be able to measure the success of your marketing efforts. And if you know the peak hours or days for your retail store, you can plan flash sales or special offers during periods of high foot traffic. 

💡Tip: Shopify unifies order, customer, and inventory data to get a complete 360-degree view on retail performance. Monitor how customers move from online to offline channels, the impact of marketing campaigns, and view detailed inventory reports to make smarter decisions.

How to measure and analyze foot traffic 

Choosing the right foot-traffic analytics tools

The first step to improving foot traffic is measuring it. Only by tracking foot-traffic trends over time can you identify how factors like seasonality or marketing activations impact store foot traffic.

Thankfully, there are plenty of great modern analytics tools to help calculate foot traffic and collect information about the customers who visit your brick-and-mortar store.

You can automatically gather in-store foot traffic intel with one of the following tools:

• Thermal sensors: Dor’s thermal-sensing people-counter is battery operated and sticks above the entrance of your store. It anonymously counts foot traffic without capturing customer data or requiring IT setup.
• Surveillance cameras: Companies like WingArc have technology that runs a video-analytics algorithm over the feed from your security system to measure and track customer activity. It also generates heatmaps to view customer flow and low- and high-traffic areas of the store.
• POS data: Cross-reference the total number of shoppers who entered your store that you measured with traffic-tracking software to the total number of orders or gross sales processed by your store’s pPOS system. 
• Social engagement: Encourage customers to check in at in-store demos, or hold an in-store event that requires attendees to RSVP and/or fill out a survey that provides you with their data. You can require customers to provide information when they log in to the free store Wi-Fi. 

Manual and low-cost counting methods

If you’re not quite ready to invest in software, start by keeping a tally of the number of people who enter your retail store each day. You can do this by manually jotting down the numbers in a notebook or using a tally or click counter. This method won’t give you the most accurate results, but it’s still a great place to start. 

Interpreting your foot-traffic data to find opportunities

Foot-traffic data can help you schedule the right number of sales associates for your busy and slow times, track conversion rates alongside sales data, and ensure that your store is designed in a way that facilitates customer engagement.

Here’s what that might look like in practice:

• Identify “cold spots” in your store where products aren't getting attention, and rearrange your layout to guide customer flow towards them.
• Pinpoint “hot spots” that get the most foot traffic and place popular items there, or rearrange underperforming products to be in more visible spots. 
• Find days with the highest footfall to understand when your store is busiest and schedule staff, promotions, or events effectively.
• Compare foot traffic against marketing campaigns to understand whether promotions, window displays, or events actually draw more people inside.

How to increase foot traffic: 10 proven strategies

You may think there are only offline strategies to increase foot traffic, but more and more retailers are blurring the lines between physical and digital customer experiences to boost sales and foot traffic. 

Here are a few ways to increase foot traffic using online and offline tactics:

1. Leverage your online presence
2. Host in-store events
3. Perfect your window display
4. Improve store layout and design
5. Differentiate products
6. Offer in-store exclusives
7. Offer omnichannel fulfillment options
8. Award loyalty points for in-store shopping
9. Community engagement and local partnerships
10. Improve store accessibility

1. Leverage your online presence 

An omnichannel approach promotes your brick-and-mortar store through other sales channels like your ecommerce website, marketplace listings, and social media storefront. But creating an online store is just the tip of the iceberg. 

Make the most of a strong online presence to increase foot traffic by: 

• Investing in local SEO: Help local shoppers find your retail store in search results with local landing pages that target keywords they’re searching for. Blenders Eyewear, for example, includes regional phrases like “Pacific Beach,” “Mission Bay,” and “La Jolla” on the landing page for their Pacific Beach flagship store.
• Optimizing local search listings: Google Business Profile, Yelp, and Apple Maps tend to be free and let you display store information—including a link to your website, store hours, contact details, a map, reviews, and photos of your products. This way, shoppers can easily find your store and plan a visit.
• Improving social engagement: By improving engagement on your social media channels, you’ll interact with more potential and existing customers.The more connected your local audience feels to your business, the more likely they are to shop in-store. 

💡Tip: Shopify is the only platform to natively unify POS and ecommerce on the same platform. Customers get the same seamless experience wherever they prefer to shop, while you get one centralized operating system to streamline operations. An independent research study found this unified approach reduces total cost of ownership (TCO) by 22% on average. 

2. Host in-store events

Invite customers to in-store events that introduce new products and demos, as well as celebrate anniversaries, holidays, or customer loyalty. Events also increase engagement with your customer base, as it gives you the chance to interact with them face to face in a social setting.

Luggage brand BÉIS applies this concept to popup shops. They recently hosted a “BÉIS wash” event, where existing customers could bring in their bags for a professional clean. 

CEO Adeela Hussain Johnson says as a result of these IRL experiences, “We see an average 30% increase in traffic during pop-up activation and an average revenue lift of 10%.” Customers acquired through the retail activation also have a 20% higher 12-month long-term value (LTV). 

3. Perfect your window display

Visual merchandising describes how you display items around the store, including product displays, mannequins, and window displays. For example, placing bestselling products at the front of the store can attract passersby who see them from the street, while eye-catching window displays turn heads and drive foot traffic. 

From sidewalk signs to Instagrammable artwork, creative and sometimes humorous window displays can also help draw in more foot traffic. And if customers take photos and share them on social media, it’s a win-win: You’ll have enticed them to come in, and received more online exposure for your retail store.

4. Improve store layout and design 

Developing a retail merchandising strategy in tandem with your plans for store design will help you make the most of floor space to improve traffic flow. It will also help you plan new product drops and implement cross-merchandising strategies to increase cross-selling and upselling opportunities. 

Here are some additional tips to maximize foot traffic through store layout and design: 

• Consider seasons, special occasions, and holidays when creating your merchandising plan.
• Use innovative displays to make the in-store experience compelling, engaging, and unique. 
• Focus on themes or group products by brand for an easier customer experience. 
• Constantly refresh product displays and fixtures, either with new products or by shifting merchandise to attract customers back into your store more often. 

Essential oil brand NEOM, for example, displays samples of their bestselling products in-store. The scent alone is enough to draw in passersby. Once they’re in, they can “try before they buy” and find a scent they love.

5. Differentiate your products

Being located in a high foot traffic area doesn’t guarantee success. You’ll need to find ways to win over foot traffic from other retailers and make enough sales to justify the higher rent you’re likely paying to set up shop in a high traffic zone. 

While you’re looking for a commercial space, take note of the types of retailers that are already in the area. If you sell activewear and there’s already a boutique that sells fitness clothing, it could be an indication that you will reach your target audience. But if your products are too similar, you run the risk of losing business to the store that already has a loyal customer base.

6. Offer in-store exclusives

In-store exclusives can increase foot traffic during slow periods or when you need to liquidate inventory. Even if customers don’t make it to your event, your marketing efforts will still be beneficial for brand awareness.

That could include special offers such as:

• Limited-edition products
• Exclusive bundles 
• Early releases
• Special discounts
• Events or workshops 

Jewelry retailer Little Words Project, for example, unifies customer data inside Shopify—something the brand uses to invite VIP customers back in-store. “We’re using data we’re getting from Shopify to attract customers near particular stores for exclusive beading experiences and appreciation events,” says Martin Hogan, director of stores. 

This creates a continuous loop of personalized outreach. As Hogan explains, “If you've had a great experience at our beading table or if you tell us a special story, we can follow up with you.”

7. Offer omnichannel fulfillment options

Modern order fulfillment options such as buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) and curbside pickup let you create a seamless online-to-offline shopping experience that also boosts customer satisfaction. 

The added benefit: When a customer comes to your store to pick up their order, they will likely take a quick look around and could wind up buying more products, leading to more revenue. 

💡Tip: Enable in-store pickup availability in Shopify admin to show online shoppers whether a product is available for pickup at one of your stores.

8. Award loyalty points for in-store shopping

Combat rising customer acquisition costs by inviting previous shoppers back in-store through a POS loyalty program. As an extra incentive to shop in-store instead of online, offer to increase the value of loyalty points on retail purchases. For example, they could earn 5 points for every dollar spent in-store, compared to 1 point online. 

9. Community engagement and local partnerships

Host events in partnership with other local businesses to increase your reach and bring customers in-store. Those retailers will also promote the event via social media, email marketing, and word of mouth, driving increased foot traffic to your store.

If you have extra square footage that you’re not using in-store, take your partnership strategy a step further by hosting a shop-in-shop experience. Invite the partner to display their products within your space and have their team drive their own audience towards your location. They’ll likely add your products to their basket during their visit. 

10. Improve store accessibility

All retail stores must be accessible by law, but making it easier and more convenient to visit can drive foot traffic to your store and away from competitors who don’t.

Simple tips to improve the retail customer experience and create an inclusive store include: 

• Extended weeknight opening hours 
• Sharing proximity to bus or train stops
• Designated parking spaces for people with children or disabled parking permits
• Promoting ramps, automatic doors, and wide aisles for wheelchair and stroller access

Monitor and boost foot traffic for your retail store

Whether you start small by reviewing surveillance recordings or dive right into using advanced tracking software, understanding what brings customers in-store and how they move through your shop will help you make the most of this important metric that ultimately affects the success of your retail business strategy.

Shopify is on hand to not only collect and unify your data, but make sense of what that data shows. All of your most important information flows back to one central operating system, making it easier to answer questions like: Did that marketing campaign drive foot traffic? Has revenue increased since we refreshed our window displays?