How to use Footfall Data to Decide When to Schedule Digital Signage Content

When do people enter your office? When do they tend to walk down the hallways, congregate at the water cooler, or head towards the exits? When are they focused, walking purposefully, talking on their phones, or chatting with colleagues? When are they less engaged, looking around as they walk?

Foot traffic data is critical for retail locations, the difference between not having enough checkout lines open or having far too many rotisserie chickens ready for sale. But it’s also crucial offices, warehouses, and other work environments—as it tells you when and where’s the best place to put your company messages.

Your company will spend over a thousand dollars on each TV you add to your workplace. And you’ll spend hours crafting the perfect company TV content to engage your team and get them to notice your signage. It’s worth taking the time to gather data to inform your signage placement—and content timing.

Here’s how to track footfall and use it to decide where to place your company TVs.

Start with informed guesses

Queues snake around the corner of a local coffee shop at 8:45AM and 12:45PM. You could confirm that by waiting nearby—or, equally easily, you could guess the time based on when most companies nearby start work and break for lunch (and human psychology around when one needs a caffeine boost).

Similar intuition works for your office. That’s likely how you’ve picked the spots to place your company signage. Your lobby’s an obvious spot, as are hallways leading towards your office or restrooms, and your break room or water cooler.

But how many people actually walk through each area? What time are they most likely to come through?

Guessing’s not enough for screen placement in larger workspaces or more precise signage content scheduling. For that, you’ll need to start counting.

Manually survey your office footfall

The cheapest way to track footfall is also the most monotonous: Manually. You’ve likely seen someone at a museum or other public building clicking as people enter the building, then again as they leave. You could do the same at your office with a $3-$10 click counter, or a free smartphone app.

This wouldn’t be the best idea for extended tracking. You’ll spend more time, clicking every time someone walks by, than you’ll save in hardware and setup costs. But, if you pay attention while clicking, you might get enough data to inform your signage that would make it worth your while.

Don’t just track how many people walk by. Note other things. How are they walking? Purposefully, rushing through a space, or slowly, looking around as they walk? Are they alone or in groups? Which teams are most represented at which times?

Do this on a few different days at the times when people are most likely to walk by (mornings, noon, and evenings), and you’ll both have footfall numbers and the data on how much of a chance you have at getting attention from the people walking by.

Automatically track footfall with sensors

A less tedious method is a silent version of the ding-dong sensors that announce every entrance into a minimart. 

They are typically called people counters and come in two parts: A sensor and a transmitter. Place them on opposite walls or sides of a doorway. Then whenever someone walks by, the sensor will add another number to its rolling count. The cheapest sensors are small lasers, for around $40, that are typically used to count packages on a factory line. For around $200, you can get a more accurate infrared sensor designed to sense only people—and, depending on the model, detect direction (especially helpful to know how people are facing for ideal screen placement) and log results to a smartphone app. You could put one sensor in each location where you’re considering hanging a sign—and while someone walking through a hallway then entering a break room would get counted twice, you’d at least know how many times the hallway screens would get seen versus the break room’s signage.

Here, you’ll often only get daily traffic reports. You could hack around that by checking your sensor once per hour, and logging the count each time to graph your footfall changes throughout the day. Or, with more advanced sensor options such as the $89/month thermal-sensing Dor device, you can watch detailed stats on exactly when people walk through a doorway or hallway.

If your office already has security cameras, you might be able to get footfall data for free. Many security cameras can recognize when people walk past, then save a clip each time or log the total number of people who walked by. Or, pair any camera video feed (even one from a repurposed phone) with people counting software like Camlytics from $9/month (pictured above) or open-source counting tools like Supervision. That’s another way to track footfall—and, if you take the time to watch the footage, to get similar data that you’d get with manual footfall counting without having to camp out in the hallway. An even more advanced version would be to use webcam tracking paired with screens, as we did with Quivid in a study on digital signage effectiveness—a worthwhile investment for the highest-value screens in high-traffic locations.

If you use cameras, though, always check your local privacy laws and post any necessary notices that cameras are being used in the area. Also make sure your software anonymizes the data—something both Camlytics and Quivid offer—and ideally blur faces or obscure other identifiable data.

Use software and device data to estimate footfall

Your company’s routers provide another way to estimate footfall. Basic routers show a list of all devices connected to WiFi that could be checked manually similar to the cheapest people counting devices. More advanced company router equipment can log access times and track traffic on each router and repeater throughout the network—something that may already have the general footfall data you need. Or, you could get similar data from Bluetooth or WiFi-powered people counters that check for nearby devices—or could build a custom device tracker with a Raspberry Pi.

None of those options will tell you specifically how many people walk down a hallway or enter a specific room. They will, though, give you general data around what time people tend to arrive at work, where most people congregate in larger spaces, and which days have the most people in office.

You might also find similar data in your company’s software. The most direct way is with desk booking software, if your office lets your team book desks in an open floor plan space or reserve meeting rooms. Those together give you a precise view of how many people are in your office, and when they’re most likely to arrive.

Other apps might include more generalized office arrival time data. Slack, for example, tracks user presence to show if team members are currently online. You could track that manually; click the member count at the top of a channel and see who’s currently online. Or, better for logging times, use Slack’s API to log every time a team member’s status changes. That won’t tell you if people are in the office, though; they’ll show up online if they check Slack on the train. At best, it’s a supplemental way to add color to your footfall data (say, to estimate when most people walk away for a break, regardless of which direction they move). Retail locations could get better app-driven data by checking transaction times—and you could estimate where people frequent at which times based on the times they purchased.

Track footfall with digital signage and QR codes

With a bit of intuition paired plus some data gathering, you’ve got a general idea of where people move and when. Now, you need to figure out if your screens are getting their attention. 

You could do this with camera-based systems, as mentioned previously, potentially tracking footfall, dwell time, and attention together. Or, without any cameras, you could track your signage’s effectiveness with QR codes and surveys.

QR codes are the simplest option. ScreenCloud’s digital signage software includes built-in QR code tracking. Share a link on your screens with ScreenCloud’s built-in Links, Ask a Question, Canvas, or Webhooks apps, and ScreenCloud will turn it into a QR code automatically. You can then track how many times your QR codes were scanned in ScreenCloud’s Metrics tab.

ScreenCloud shows daily stats. For more granular tracking data, you could make a custom QR code in an app like Bitly. Or, you could make different slides—and corresponding links—for every hour of the work day. Schedule your signage slides then track the daily scan stats. That’ll help you know which hours people are most likely to see your signage (or, at least, which hours they’re likely to see it while being free enough to scan a QR code). It’ll also give you better stats on morning and evenings, say, since someone who scanned a slide in the morning isn’t likely to scan the same slide this evening.

Another option is to survey your audience. Put something interesting and unique on your signage during the hours you want to test, something that’ll catch your team’s attention and make them look twice, but that they’ll only have learned through that screen. Then, in Microsoft Teams or Slack, survey your team about something that was on your screens. You’ll quickly find out if people are paying attention to your signage—and with smart scheduling, you could even use that to estimate what times people pay attention the most.

Build effective company TVs

With footfall data and attention surveys in hand, you’re ready to place smarter signage throughout your workplace. As you’re rolling out your signage and scheduling content, keep in mind that the most important content on your screens is what people want to see—not necessarily the messages your company wants to share. And if you keep things interesting and focused on the times when people are most likely to see your screens, you’ll have the best chance at fighting screen blindness

Once you’ve rolled out your newly optimized screens, try running your footfall surveys again. See if traffic patterns have changed, or if people are still noticing your screens months later. Change things up; a screen that’s getting ignored might get a better return on investment in a new location. The only thing static is your company’s need to get your messaging across to your team. Everything else is up for experimentation.

Image Credits: Coffee Shop queue photo by Michał Parzuchowski; header photo by Sara Kurfeß