Foot traffic: the most useful number in local business, and the easiest to misuse
Where people actually go, in the physical world, in countable numbers. That's the whole subject. It sounds simple — which is exactly how everyone gets into trouble.
Every physical business lives or dies by a number most owners never see written down: how many human beings pass, enter and return. Rent quietly prices it. Ad sellers gesture at it. Landlords negotiate around it. And for most of retail history it was folklore — "good corner", "dead end of the street" — passed along like fishing advice.
That changed when phones started carrying location signals around and counting hardware got cheap. Foot traffic became data: imperfect, occasionally misleading, but data — queryable, comparable, arguable-with. A coffee shop can now check whether the "high-traffic location" in the broker's deck is high-traffic on weekday mornings, when coffee actually sells, or only on Saturday nights, when it sells nothing.
This site is a working guide to that data. How the numbers get made, which decisions they're good for — choosing a site, planning outdoor ads, judging a store change — and the specific ways they lie to optimists. We come at this from the practitioner side, not the vendor side: the test of a foot traffic number is whether you'd sign a lease on it.
The guide
How foot traffic is actually measured
Phone panels, door counters, wifi sniffing, cameras and plain old clipboards — what each method really counts, and the error bars nobody prints on the dashboard.
Picking a location with traffic data (and when to overrule it)
The site-selection questions footfall genuinely answers, the ones it can't, and the rent trap hiding inside "busy".
Foot traffic and out-of-home advertising
Footfall as the currency of billboards, transit and venue screens — how planners use it, and the difference between passing and noticing.
From traffic to sales: what to do with the people you've got
Conversion, dayparts and the in-store layer — because attracting footfall is expensive, and wasting it is free.
Our bias, stated upfront
We like measured numbers more than modelled ones, denominators more than totals, and any data source that admits its error bars. We don't sell data, media or software, and nobody pays for placement in these pages. When something here is an estimate, we'll call it one — a habit we warmly recommend to the entire industry.