Footfall: counting visitors and knowing what the number means

Footfall is the count of people entering a shop or venue over a period. On its own it is close to meaningless — it rises with weather, holidays and whatever is happening next door — and it becomes useful only when paired with what those people did. The common mistake is treating footfall as a performance measure rather than as a denominator.

What footfall is actually for

• Conversion rate: transactions divided by visitors, which is the number that reflects how the shop is run.
• Staffing: matching cover to the hours people actually arrive rather than to opening hours.
• Testing changes — a window display, a promotion, new opening times — against visitors rather than sales alone.
• Comparing locations after adjusting for their catchment, not before.
• Spotting a problem early, since footfall usually falls before revenue does.

Counting it honestly

Every counting method has a bias and you need to know yours. Door sensors count staff, delivery drivers and the same person leaving and returning; some count pairs as one. Wi-Fi counting misses anybody with the radio off and over-counts people walking past outside. Manual counts are accurate and expensive. None of this matters much if the bias is constant, because you are comparing periods rather than measuring an absolute — which is why changing counting method resets your history, and the change has to be recorded where somebody will see it a year later.

Subtract staff from the count or accept that a small shop with four people on shift records a meaningless number of entries before a single customer arrives. The correction is crude but it has to be deliberate rather than forgotten.

The comparisons that mislead

1. Comparing to last week when the weather differed, which explains more variation than most trading decisions.
2. Comparing to last year without adjusting for the day of the week the date fell on.
3. Comparing locations with different catchments as though the difference were about the staff.
4. Reading a rise in footfall as success when conversion fell at the same time — more people came in and fewer of them bought.
5. Judging a promotion by footfall alone, since discounting reliably brings in people who buy only the discounted item.

Ettex Sheets is enough to hold the daily count beside transactions and takings, which is all conversion needs. The useful habit is recording the counting method and any change to it in the same place, because an unexplained step in the data is indistinguishable from a real change in trade.