Geolytix Footfall Tracker: Retail Place Daily Visitor Numbers

If you haven’t already heard, we’re super excited to be launching our new footfall products for GEOLYTIX Retail Places. This blog focusses on Tracker - reporting visitor numbers in Retail Places over time.  Check out our other blog on Small Area Footfall – a contiguous hex grid showing footfall estimates at micro level within Retail Places.

GEOLYTIX Footfall Tracker uses mobility data to monitor the average number of daily visitors to Retail Places each month.

Tracker reports the daily visitor numbers and the monthly year on year comparison (this month compared to same month last year).

It’s available for 15,000 Retail Places across the UK.

Visitor numbers are reported from Jan 2021 and are updated monthly (2 years of historic data maintained).

Tracker registers unique mobile devices once every 24 hours, meaning a person will only be counted once per day, no matter how long they dwell in the Retail Place.

Easily access Footfall Tracker in GEOLYTIX MAPP. Full download functionality included.

Long term we clearly see the steady return of visitors to the West End. What’s striking, if you’ll excuse the pun, is the impact of the rail strikes in the lead up to Christmas 2022. We’d have expected to see daily visitor numbers continue to climb in November and December of 2022, instead they drop off from October. In November visitor numbers are 5% lower than October and in December numbers are 11% down on October.

In contrast if we look at all City Centres across the UK in the Retail Place comparison table, we see November is 2% higher than October, December is still down 3%. Keep in mind these numbers are national and therefore include the City Centres in London (all impacted by the strikes). Having had my curiosity piqued I did a bit more digging by downloading all the Tracker data from MAPP and had a look at City Centres outside London versus in London.

Why we love using Tracker

See long and short-term shifts in visitor numbers. Answer with robustness questions around high street/shopping centre decline or regeneration and uplifts in seasonal or event driven footfall.

It’s really easy to compare visitor numbers between locations.  As I’ve done above you can look at a location verse the region and Retail Place Type in MAPP, or download the whole dataset and compare as many Places as you want to.  A favourite with our customers is to correlate the performance of the existing estate against total visitor numbers and increase/decline.

At the moment Tracker and Footfall are only available in the UK, but we’ll post another blog shortly about our International Business Index – identifying activity hot spots in markets across the world.

To learn more about how mobility data works check out our earlier blog – Mobility data: Behind the Scenes.

We’d be delighted to give you a demo of Tracker and Footfall and talk to you about any specific needs on tracking visitor numbers you might have, just get in touch at info@geolytix.com.

Samantha Colebatch, Director at GEOLYTIX

Main Image: Photo by Artur Kraft on Unsplash