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Get a Visual on Your Black Friday Foot Traffic

Network and location analytics help retailers optimize their sales strategies.

The holidays consist of the biggest and busiest shopping days of the year. Whether in store or online, Black Friday and Cyber Monday are crucial times for retailers to kick off the shopping season. Using the Cisco Meraki dashboard, retailers gain powerful tools like location analytics and network usage analytics that provide valuable insight into customers.

This year was no different with surges in store traffic, spikes on shopping websites, and retailers working hard to appeal to their target customers.

 

Black Friday In Stores

One of our retail customers allowed us to take a look at how Black Friday affected traffic in their stores.

Navigating to Organization > Location analytics, an incredible 47% increase in passing traffic and 41% increase in visitors is seen across all of their stores on Black Friday. This snapshot of Presence counts the number of smart devices near the Cisco Meraki APs. Not only was there an increase in people passing by the store, but a significant correlating increase in customers staying and/or connecting to the store’s WiFi network.

Update: Cisco Meraki Presence is now known as CMX (Connected Mobile Experiences), a comprehensive location analytics and engagement platform ideal for both cloud-managed or on-premise solutions. Click here to learn more.

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Retailers can compare two locations below and see that while there is higher traffic at one store, there is a better average capture rate at the other store.

2013 12 03 Analytics Blog.ProximityCompare

Zoom in further to see that traffic steadily trended upward through the middle of the day and then decreased in the evening, prompting retailers to tailor employee schedules or offers for early morning or evening sales accordingly.

2013 12 03 Analytics Blog.ProximityZoom

Taking a look at customer engagement data in the next graph, we can see that most visitors stayed for 5-20 minutes and the number of customers who stayed longer than 20 minutes more than doubled. Network admins and marketing teams can take advantage of the built in Presence API to create customized offers to those walking by or already in the store, increasing dwell times.

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Presence also provides customer loyalty data, allowing admins to gauge what percentage of the population are new versus repeat customers. At this retailer, the number of new customers quadrupled and the number of loyal, repeat customers tripled.

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Cyber Monday Online

At Cisco Meraki headquarters, Cyber Monday has had an influence on network traffic. Built-in Layer 7 application visibility reveals an increase in overall network usage as well as traffic trends on specific sites. Below we can see that traffic to amazon.com has a significant spike on Cyber Monday when compared to last week.

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Retailers can also use this information to see if their customers are visiting competitor sites to compare online Cyber Monday prices. Network admins and marketing teams can then customize in-store or online offers to increase customer engagement and loyalty.

Based on the trends from the Thanksgiving holiday shopping period, there are countless opportunities to tailor customers’ experiences and prepare stores for the next month of holiday shopping. Learn more about Presence and check out next Tuesday’s webinar on Network Analytics to find out how you can optimize your network.