Yes, there is a whole new page in the dashboard. You may have already heard about Presence, our new cloud-based location analytics and customer engagement solution. I’m going to spend some time diving into one of the most important Presence features, the location analytics dashboard built into the Cisco Meraki wireless LAN and available now to all customers.

We’ve aggregated some pretty cool statistics in order to give you even deeper visibility into what’s happening around your office location, business, or store. As usual, your Meraki wireless APs are going above and beyond passing traffic: they’re now detecting user presence based on probe requests seen from WiFi devices. Your APs can detect wireless devices like smartphones, laptops, and tablets—even if they don’t connect to the wireless network—and we bring you this data in customizable graphs right in the dashboard.

Appeal

Appeal measures the number of people passing by an AP vs. those sticking around. The obvious application here is for retailers who would like to see if a store is capturing valuable customers as they walk past storefront windows, but there are many applications. Check out how Peet’s Coffee & Tea, a national chain of cafés, is using Appeal to learn about foot traffic at each store location.

We can determine how many visitors vs. passersby were near this Peet’s wireless network and what times they were there. We can even zoom in to a single day to understand what times have the highest traffic in order to optimize our store and business environments.

We can scroll over any point in the graph to gain further insight. In the image above we can see that at 9 o’clock on May 3rd, there were 55 total passersby but 26 of these entered the store.

Engagement

Expanding on the Appeal statistics, we can also measure visit length by using the same WiFi probe requests. In the example below, we can check out the duration of stay at this same Peet’s location. Once again, we can scroll over to learn that last Friday, 48 of our visitors stayed 45 minutes or more, while most other customers had shorter visit periods.

Engagement statistics can be easily used to dig deeper into retail and enterprise markets, helping retailers capitalize on longer visitor dwell times to increase sales. We have even added the ability to export these statistics for use with your own CRM systems or 3rd party retail analytics tools through the Presence API.

Loyalty

Finally, we can also measure new vs. repeat visitors. In the example below, we can see that most of our visitors are first time visitors, but about half of the customers visit this location once a month, or even daily in some cases.

This data is also great for retailers as they work to enhance the customer experience and reward repeat visits.

We are pretty excited about making Presence Analytics available to Meraki customers.  Join us to learn more about these new features at a special webinar on Thursday, May 23rd. Sign up for free. Qualified attendees receive a free Cisco Meraki access point!

Are you ready for the K-12 deployment season?

Summer months at schools can be the busiest and most hectic months of the year.  The IT team is scrambling to update networks, roll out new technology initiatives, and prepare for the next school year.  We know that K-12 environments have unique challenges, but the Cisco Meraki solution can make networking simpler for schools.

We’ve put together a special webinar series just for our K-12 crowd, featuring an array of customers as well as technical deep dives into our wireless solution.  In our deep dive webinars, we focus specifically on the challenges faced in K-12 school districts, including how to easily support high-density usage, manage thousands of devices, secure your network for different user groups, and more.

Check out how hundreds of schools are making the grade with Cisco Meraki.  Take a look at the schedule for this summer’s K-12 series below, and sign up for a webinar at meraki.cisco.com/k12.

A quick show of hands, please: how many of you are running guest WiFi for your organization? Free WiFi is now available in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, hospital waiting rooms, and retail locations across the country. These days, customers check for — and expect — wireless access.

Cisco Meraki already provides an intuitive, easy-to-configure solution for secure guest WiFi that many customers have deployed. But what if you want to provide a more seamless sign-on experience, or increase brand exposure via your guest access deployment?

Now you can do all of this, thanks to Cisco Meraki Presence, a suite of cloud-based location analytics and engagement features which includes Cisco Meraki WiFi with Facebook Login.  This feature lets your customers connect to WiFi by checking in on Facebook, using your organization’s Facebook Page as a splash page.

Guest access to Philz Coffee’s wireless network using WiFi with Facebook login.

Why this is awesome

Here are some benefits: first, you get access to aggregate and anonymous demographic data Facebook provides about your Page and on check-ins — statistics like the age and gender of those groups of people connecting. This helps you understand more about your audience, which can help you tailor customer experience and advertisements. For example, what if you’re a coffee shop and discover that the majority of your customers are women in their 30s? Maybe you make some changes to your coffee and food menu, or tune the type of music playing in your shops, or update the content of your Facebook Page to better suit their tastes.

When guests check in on Facebook, a story may post to their News Feed, viewable by their Facebook friends. People can see that their friend visited your location and “like” this story, thereby promoting your organization with virtual word-of-mouth recognition. And if friends of your guest are close by, they now know about your business and may decide to visit as well.

Facebook News Feed event generated by WiFi with Facebook login.

Finally, you can provide an intuitive, convenient experience for guests trying to access WiFi — a smoother process than having guests ask a barista, lobby clerk, or employee for an access code and typing that into a splash page.

Configure in two clicks

Deploying guest access using WiFi with Facebook login takes two clicks in Cisco Meraki’s dashboard: first elect to use a splash page for guest SSID sign-on, then select “Facebook Wi-Fi” as the method for sign-on.

It’s that simple.

Enabling WiFi with Facebook Login.

Just follow the link in Cisco Meraki’s dashboard to configure your Facebook Page and pair your Cisco Meraki network with your Facebook Page:

Pairing your organization’s Facebook Page with your Cisco Meraki network.

 Available now

We’ve already begun a full-scale, staged release of this feature to our wireless customers, but if you prefer, you can get this new feature today by contacting Cisco Meraki tech support. Otherwise, keep your eyes peeled for Cisco Meraki updates soon!

Working with our customers over the past couple of years, we’ve come to believe that the next leap in networking will be moving beyond speeds and feeds, and building features into the network that enable IT to solve new business problems and engage more deeply with users. We’re excited to announce Presence, a new suite of features that fundamentally expands the role a network can play.

Presence provides insight into mobile behavior across locations, and enables you to enhance your onsite customer experience. Presence includes:

• Real-time location metrics displayed in the Meraki Dashboard

• Cisco Meraki WiFi with Facebook login

• Presence API, allowing you to integrate real-time location data into your CRM and business systems

• 3rd party analytics integration

In traditional Meraki style, Presence is included with the Cisco Meraki Wireless LAN at no additional cost. It’s 100% cloud-managed, and requires no additional hardware, software, or configuration complexity. You can try it out on your network today, or read more below:

Location analytics dashboard

The first exciting feature to highlight is our location analytics dashboard. Unlike traditional systems that require dedicated sensors and software, Presence analytics are available out-of-the-box, with no additional cost (batteries included, no assembly required). The Location analytics dashboard displays real-time metrics such as capture rate, median visit length, and visitor repeat rate for mobile devices in proximity to your Meraki access points. The access points collect this information and sync it with Meraki’s cloud, where it’s visually synthesized for you:

The new location analytics dashboard displays key metrics that measure the appeal, engagement, and loyalty of visitors.

This information can immediately help you make better decisions about how to engage your onsite visitors. For example, a retailer can use this information to gauge how traffic drivers such as in-store promotions, window display changes, or new advertising impact foot traffic to your retail locations, and whether customers are spending more time in your store. If you correlate these data with revenue data, you can notice if any upticks in sales coincide with actions you’ve taken to enhance customer experience.

And it’s not just retailers who benefit. Hotels can easily discover when peak hours are for lobby staff or whether guests spend enough time in the lobby to warrant opening a coffee shop. Other organizations can use the real-time location data to learn, say, whether a new building renovation has increased its utilization. Decisions about WiFi availability, physical security, energy savings, and more will all be better informed.

Cisco Meraki WiFi with Facebook login

Cisco and Facebook have partnered to let guests log in to WiFi networks with their Facebook account, creating a seamless experience for users, and helping businesses expand their social marketing and engagement. We’re excited that the flexibility and extensibility of Meraki’s cloud architecture enables this technology to reach thousands of network operators for the first time.

Connecting to Philz Coffee’s guest network using WiFi with Facebook login.

With this integration you will have access to Facebook Page insights, which includes aggregate demographic information of the customers checking in (furthering your understanding of who your target customers or visitors are). You’ll also get increased exposure on Facebook with each new check-in. When guests check-in they will land on your Facebook Page, where they can like your Page, and interact with your business. With these new connections you will be able share announcements, content and offers with customers who like your Page.

Configuring and deploying WiFi with Facebook login takes 2 clicks in Meraki’s dashboard: first elect to use a splash page for guest SSID sign-on, and then select “Facebook Wi-Fi” as the method for sign-on. It’s that simple.

Enabling WiFi with Facebook login in the Meraki dashboard.

Presence API

Another exciting feature of the Meraki Presence release is the Presence API, which delivers all the real-time location statistics captured by Meraki APs to your custom-built application — providing unlimited flexibility for you if you have special requirements or would like to parse the data in a custom way. For example, you might combine our Presence and EXCAP APIs to prompt guest WiFi users to enter phone numbers or email addresses to gain access, enabling push notifications to staff when a top customer visits, or the delivery of targeted customer offers.

3rd-party analytics integration

Cisco Meraki now collaborates with best-in-class analytics vendors via our Presence API, allowing raw data collected from our intelligent access points to be parsed by these applications. Our list of integrations is growing, and currently includes:

• Euclid Analytics

• Nearbuy Systems

• WalkBase

• Nomi

• Swarm

• Boldstreet Wireless

• Purple WiFi

These integrations grant you the utmost flexibility, letting you view our real-time location data in the interface you prefer.

Privacy

We take privacy seriously, and have invested in technologies and policies that provide network operators with new tools while maintaining industry-leading safeguards on privacy. In the spirit of transparency, we have described our Presence technology and the inner workings of the Presence API in great detail in our Presence Analytics white paper. In summary, Meraki collects no personally identifiable information (e.g., we don’t see or store a user’s Facebook credentials). Clients’ MAC addresses, used to construct location analytics dashboards, are hashed and truncated before being stored in Meraki’s cloud so they cannot be associated with an individual device (i.e. there’s no data stored that can show that a given device was at a specific location.) Users can also opt-out of Meraki’s Presence data collection across all Meraki networks; we won’t store MAC addresses — hashed or otherwise — and Presence events will not be passed through the API.

Available now

Current wireless customers can call Meraki tech support now to request Presence functionality immediately, but a full-scale rollout of Presence is currently underway — so keep your eyes open for update notifications. If you would like to test drive Meraki APs in your organization, it’s easy to get your hands on some. 

Join us to learn more about these new features at a special webinar on Thursday, May 23rd. Sign up for free — qualified attendees receive a free Cisco Meraki access point! We’ll also be diving into each of these exciting features in future posts, so stay tuned!