Until now there was no way to understand customers’ shopping habits except by hiring experts to come to your store for a few short days.  Now with the Adveyesor software suite by IntelLens and a handful of low cost video cameras you can monitor traffic patterns and behaviors in and around your store to get the information you need to increase your sales!  Adveyesor continuously collects information anonymously and does its job completely automatically.  At the end of every day it creates and sends reports directly to you.

You can use Adveyesor to understand:

• Car and pedestrian traffic patterns outside of your storefront.
• Hot and cold spots of customer traffic inside your store.
• Trends in traffic based on the time of day, the day of the week, the season or even the weather.

Adveyesor can help answer important business questions such as:

• What should the store hours be based on the available pool of potential customers?
• How many staff members should be working to meet demand based on predicted traffic?
• Are advertising campaigns bringing in more customers than before?
• Has a display stopped drawing enough attention and needs to be replaced?
• Are customers paying a lot of attention to a display but not buying?
• … and many more!

Adveyesor has been in use at Clay's store - Rainbow Confections in downtown Monroe, WI - for almost a year.  Several reports from the candy store are available for free on the IntelLens web site at http://www.intellens.com/sample.  Reports on this page are updated every day at the close of business.  Clay will also be presenting a series of seminars on retail video analytics featuring Adveyesor at the Monroe Chamber of Commerce in the month of August.  Feel free to contact him any time at clay@intellens.com or 224-595-8998 for more information.

The beauty of Adveyesor is that it is always working for you, providing an unbiased picture of your business environment.  It is silently collecting information for you each and every day, and the more days that go by the more interesting results become.  As days turn into weeks and months, trends become obvious, revealing the potential for improvements that was otherwise hidden in plain view.

I will illustrate this with an analysis of data from a retail store in a small downtown area.  This location uses two sub-$100 cameras, one placed in the front window to monitor pedestrian and car traffic while the other is monitoring the cashier's station.  Since the store only draws customers from the street, understanding traffic patterns is critical information.  The storefront is the primary means of getting drivers to park and then convince them to come in the front door.

This brings to mind two questions:
    1. Of the available foot traffic, how effective is the store at drawing customers inside?
    2. How does the vehicle traffic translate into pedestrians and customers?

Adveyesor provides the answers.

This chart shows people walking by on the sidewalk compared to customer activity at the checkout.  Saturdays have the green marker.
Because of camera placement, the count numbers are not absolute (why there are often more counts in the store than outside), but the shape of the curves accurately reflects activity trends.
With few exceptions, it is clear that when there are people walking by, a steady flow of customers follow.  It is also apparent that the relative percentage of customers coming is highest on weekends, and Saturdays have the most pedestrians and customers.

Now let's examine vehicle traffic.  The blue customer line is the same as it was above, but now the purple line now shows car counts.
Here is a surprise result - there are more cars on late-weekdays than on Saturdays!  Though the conversion rate of drivers to pedestrians (and then customers) is highest on Saturdays, there is about three times the potential to improve weekdays, especially Fridays.

The camera doesn't lie.  Even though I am very familiar with this store I did not anticipate this result!  The trends are quite clear from the charts - these are not a subtle details that need to be teased out of the data, but obvious and repeating patterns.

It is clear that there is significant growth potential by targeting ways to get drivers to notice the store and then stop to come in.  Whether it is a social media outreach, flashier signs, weekday specials, or any other approach, it is obvious that effort and money spent to improve sales on these days can pay off sweetly.

Since Adveyesor is watching these trends all the time, once changes are made the charts can be used to objectively compare the effectiveness of the campaign.  Now there is a tool to take the guesswork out of identifying where to focus your business energies - and help you verify that the investments were worthwhile (or not)!

How can two cameras and Adveyesor help your business succeed?  Contact me to find out at sales@intellens.com.

Clay

The Adveyesor software package is an end-to-end application for acquiring images from a network of cameras, processing and storing information on customer behaviors for later review, and then interactively creating reports.

Let me take you on a brief tour of Adveyesor and kick the tires a bit.

In order for Adveyesor to know what you are interested in, you must first define rules that tell the software what to look for and what to ignore.  Just draw boxes and circles so it understands what you want to monitor.

Set a daily schedule and Adveyesor will automatically wake up an start monitoring your store.  It will keep track of all customers that follow the rules you have set, and will even send you updates by e-mail or text message, if you like.

After several days of watching your store, you can produce charts showing how each day compares to the others.  The chart is "live", so you can change your search criteria and see the results instantaneously.

By clicking on any day's point on the chart, you go directly to the hourly chart for that day.  Here, the weather overlay is shown to help you get an idea of how the weather affects your business.
This day got off to a great sunny start, but then turned gray and started to rain.  See the difference it made?

If you monitor multiple cameras, you can view them on the same chart to look for trends.

In this example, there were two cameras - a "People" camera pointed out the front window watching potential customers walk by, and a "Cashier" camera at the checkout.
On this particular day it was very clear that the draw of customers into the store from the foot traffic outside was excellent.

If charts don't tell the whole story (or you have questions about the charts) you can click on the chart to jump directly into the history and see what each customer was doing.
Here the green dot is the starting point, the red dot is the ending point. The customer's head is identified and tracked as is the overall body location and motion.

Information from multiple customers can be built up into an overall picture of where they go and how long they stay there.
One way to visualize this easily is with a "Customer Presence Map" or "heat map".  This type of analysis can help identify where customers are spending their attention within your store.

As noted in the charts above, Adveyesor can be used to monitor people outside of your business in addition to inside, giving you a powerful tool to analyze customer behaviors even before they decide to enter your store.

Don't forget about vehicle traffic!  Many customers drive by your business every day.  Wouldn't you like to know how many potential customers there are, and measure your success at drawing them inside?

I hope you are as excited by the possibilities as I am!  It is always better to have information to make grounded business decisions - and understand the impact of those decisions - than rely on gut feel or rules of thumb.  Adveyesor is a powerful tool to give you the missing information that you need about your business, in your location, with your customers, simply by positioning some cameras to monitor activity 24/7.

I would love to hear about the business problems that you are trying to solve.  Post them in the comments below and lets discuss them!
- Clay

IntelLens LLC was founded the day after Independence Day this year - July 5, 2013.  The story goes back a bit farther though.  The first full day of work on what was to become IntelLens was Monday, February 4, 2013.  At this point in late September that brings the total time to 7 1/2 months of intense development.  I hope that you have read through the web site by now, and if you are reading this there is a good chance that you are intrigued by the concept but are wondering "Where is the proof?  Show me something more concrete."

I am extremely pleased with the progress that has been made so far.  For the last two months I have had prototypes deployed at my retail store which have led to many improvements and enhancements in the product.  Right now
four cameras are monitoring human and vehicle traffic inside and around my store and providing automatic daily reports to me by e-mail and text message.

The results are very interesting and often surprising.  On several occasions I have been sure that the charts could not be correct (and therefore another bug needed to be fixed) only to investigate the images and data using the built-in tools and discover that it was the customers that were exhibiting the unexpected behaviors!  To me this is an excellent sign of the usefulness and value of the Adveyesor solution.  Even though we may feel that we understand our customers very well as owners and managers, having a tool that is always watching and always collecting unbiased information on customer behaviors can teach us something new.

I am very excited about developing (and using) this new type of business analysis tool since it provides knowledge of a portion of the decision to purchase that has been missing until now.  What gains can be made by better understanding actual customer behaviors before they reach the point of sale?  How much improvement in store performance can be made by learning from potential and actual customer interactions with products and displays?

Having knowledge is always preferable to not having knowledge, and I am highly confident that new and valuable ways of using the Adveyesor tool and the knowledge it provides will deliver big impacts on the bottom line!

In the near future I will post case studies from my store and show concrete examples of using Adveyesor in the retail environment.  Like IntelLens on Facebook and subscribe to the IntelLens Twitter feeds for news and updates.

Clay