Footfall Analytics Services for a Distribution Partner
EMBIQ's Wi-Fi footfall analytics system, supplied to a Western European analytics company that resold it under its own brand. The first deployment measured visitor traffic for a regional tourism organisation in Central Europe; EMBIQ later took over technical support and reporting for that customer directly.
Technologies used
Wi-Fi, OpenWrt, MAC address hashing, AWS, web analytics panel
Tools
Jira
6
Project members
16 months
Project length
IoT, Software Development
Category
Tourism, Retail
Branch
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The challenge
The client is a small analytics and business optimisation company from Western Europe. It wanted to offer footfall measurement to tourist destinations, retailers and other venues, but without developing its own hardware and software. In April 2019 it signed an agreement to distribute OCKO, EMBIQ's people-flow analytics system, and to sell it under its own brand, while EMBIQ remained the owner of the technology and responsible for delivering it. The first customer was a regional tourism organisation in Central Europe. It needed reliable figures on how many visitors came to key points of its region, how long they stayed and how many came back, compared across seasons. The deployment covered five terminals at key visitor locations, including tourist information points, with access to the data through the distributor's customer portal and support on working days. The system had to measure large numbers of visitors indoors and outdoors, run unattended for months, and at the same time respect visitors' privacy: no personal data could be stored, even though returning visitors had to be recognised.
Working on this project was a fascinating challenge. We had to ensure the solution was robust and reliable, capable of handling large volumes of data while maintaining user privacy. I'm proud of what our team achieved.
Key Features
- Measurement terminals that detect Wi-Fi signals from visitors' smartphones, installed indoors and outdoors with power and wired internet access
- MAC addresses hashed immediately into irreversible identifiers, so no personal data is stored
- Counting of both visits and unique visitors, with detection of returning visitors
- Dwell time per location and comparisons between measurement points
- A dedicated cloud instance for the deployment, with data made available in the distributor's own customer portal
- Remote monitoring of terminal health and remote maintenance
- Monthly statistical summaries prepared separately for each location
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The result
The five terminals went live in spring 2019 and collected data through the following seasons. In March 2020 the partners reorganised the cooperation: technical and technology support moved fully to EMBIQ, and the distributor concentrated on sales. In May 2020, under a three-party agreement, EMBIQ took over the end customer directly, set up a dedicated instance for it and delivered the outstanding reports: monthly summaries for December 2019 to June 2020, split by location, with visitor numbers, returning visitors and dwell times. When the customer asked how residents and staff were separated from visitors, EMBIQ explained the returning-visitor metric and proposed filtering out devices seen at one location for more than six to eight hours a day.
- Five terminals measuring visitor traffic at key points of a tourist region
- Monthly reports per location covering December 2019 to June 2020
- Visitor numbers, returning visitors and dwell times collected without storing personal data
- End customer handed over from the distributor to EMBIQ in May 2020, with all agreed reports delivered
The technical aspects of this project were intriguing. We had to ensure the system could accurately capture and process MAC addresses in real-time. It was a great opportunity to push the boundaries of what's possible with Wi-Fi technology.
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Agnes
business development specialist
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