Analytics in the Physical World
A friend of mine is starting a business where he’ll be displaying his products at trade shows. I’ve often attended and displayed at trade shows and have wondered how to capture the metrics I need to determine if the show or our approach was a success.
You hear the neighbors complain about traffic and what a bad show it is - but is it really? How do you compare a good show to a bad show? Obviously, if you had a lot of sales or good leads, it’s a good show. But could you have done better?
In the online world, we are blessed with reams of data. We know how many folks are visiting our site, when are our busy times, how many are engaged with the site and how many convert. However, in the physical world, we don’t have these luxuries. This makes it hard to compare different shows and different booth workers.
What if we had a way to simply gather traffic and engagement at a trade show? I think I have a way to do it, but I can’t figure out how to implement my idea. Here’s what I propose; I would like to have a cell phone sniffer that counts the number of unique cell phones walking by my booth and also the length of time each phone spends at my booth. I realize that not everyone carries a phone (similar to how not everyone has JavaScript or cookies enabled) and not all cell phones use the same carrier (similar to the different browsers we see) but at least, we could use the numbers for trends.
Could you imagine how useful this would be? Then you could measure your conversion rate and compare different shows and periods of time. Anyone know where I could find this system?
paul added the following ...
Disclosure could be handled by a sign near the sniffer. This would be similar to a site’s privacy policy. I suppose one could use a video camera and some sort of artificial intelligence to analyze the video feed as well. Would that require disclosure? How about if I hired someone to count the visitors by hand; surely that wouldn’t require disclosure.
Todd added the following ...
What about thermal imaging? 
Same problems as we live with already, though. Whether its thermal imaging or some form of phone sniffer, if the technology doesn’t apply some form of unique ID to phones/bodies so you can determine whether or not folks who walk by early come back later… you’re dropping a lot of critical data on the floor!
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/freeabs_all.jsp?tp=&arnumber=4270494&isnumber=4269956
paul added the following ...
A phone sniffer could solve this problem as each phone is unique and has its own unique code. I was also thinking of using a pressure sensitive matt in front of the booth to record pedestrians. Similar to how the highway department uses those hoses accross the road.
Judah added the following ...
I’ve seen something similar done with RFID at conferences in the supply chain space. Attendees were given an RFID tag attached to their badges. The tag contained a unique id. When they encountered an RFID reader they were logged as being in the reader’s field. In theory, time spent by unique id’s could be detected by logging when the unique tag first entered the field and when the unique tag’s signal was no longer detected. Disclosure was easy, it was attached as a note on their badges. By wearing the badge, they opted-in. Opt-out was easy too. The tag could be removed from the badge (and left in the hotel room :).
Daniel Shields added the following ...
Eric Bradlow, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School recently (2005) published a paper on pathing in Grocery Stores using radio devices in the shopping carts. The intriguing paper is available here: (http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article.cfm?articleid=1208). The study is an advanced understanding of human behavior and decision support data in the real world. Its an outstanding application of some of the same types of metrics that we’ve tried to isolate in your online ecommerce metrics. Based on that real-world application, I would suppose that variations on what Judah described would possible, and potentially robust if appropriately applied.
I’d bet there are distributed ‘Hot Spots’ throughout a venue in relation to the data of returned on multiple studies in each particular location. These could probably be manipulated by the placement of food and coffee stations, proximity to large dynamic sponsors, and ultimately whichever provides the best ‘hob-nobbing’ area within a reasonable distance from the open bar. (Omniture seems to dominate these pieces at the shows I’ve attended…;))
Not suprisingly, Dr. Bradlow and his group formed something called the Wharton Interactive Media Initiative which is dedicated to studying and researching commerce related behaviors exhibited in the diverse channels of any business.
Brad Warthan added the following ...
Not sure about a mobile phone sniffer. You’d almost think you would have to disclose to the public the fact you are using it. How about a blue-tooth detection device (much smaller crowd) or a “quid-pro-quo” free drawing/registration?