Choosing a People Counting System – How to Pick the Best Solution 

Person count is an important metric to track for stores and properties that receive a large amount of foot traffic throughout the day or week. 

Having the ability to monitor the number of people entering your business can uncover new operational insights for you to utilize. By analyzing the data from a people counting system, you’ll be able to identify areas of your business that could be streamlined for optimal customer engagement and experience as well as how the physical space of your business is being traveled. 

In this article, we’ll cover why people counting is vital to track for your business, as well as how to find the best people counting solution. 

Why People Counting is an Important Metric for Businesses to Track 

As mentioned earlier, people counting can be one of the best ways to measure the success of your sales initiatives and identify areas of operational inefficiency within your business. 

People counting can be an effective measurement for judging the effectiveness of marketing initiatives and campaigns. By analyzing the number of people entering your store alongside the number of purchases you have during a given time, you can come up with a reliable conversion rate. Seeing how many customers are converting (or purchasing) during a sales push can shed light on whether your strategy is working or if a better plan is needed to increase revenue. 

People counting is also useful for identifying footfall trends. Surfacing the trends can give you insight into what tend to be the busiest times of the day or week. This data can be instrumental in capitalizing on opportunity lost sales when the location isn’t staffed sufficiently, and by saving labor when times are slower. 

These uses can be applied to multiple businesses, whether that’s retail, quick-service restaurants, car dealerships, property management, and more. 

Finding the Best Video Security Solution for People Counting 

Because people counting is such a beneficial metric to track for businesses, finding the best people counting solution becomes crucial. 

Video security systems tend to offer the best features and accuracy when it comes to people counting systems, which is why it’s important to prioritize finding a security system equipped with analytics to identify and track persons. 

Below, we’ll cover employee exclusion and heat mapping, two features offered by AI-powered video security that can dramatically boost the accuracy of your people counting system and uncover more useful business intelligence. 

Employee Exclusion 

Employee exclusion is the ability to remove employees from customer counts, an important factor to consider when tracking conversion rates or fine-tuning your operations. 

The data offered by your chosen people counting solution needs to be accurate. If it’s skewed due to incorrect counts, then it can affect the strategies you base on it. Many people counting systems utilize IR sensors to count how many people enter or exit a store. Unfortunately, these sensors tend to give inaccurate results because they don’t account for employees who may need to enter or exit the store during their shift. 

People counting analytics combined with video security can give a much more accurate picture of how many people are entering your store by excluding employees from the total count, with advanced AI being required to accomplish this task. Powerful analytics can recognize employees by using non-facial attributes based on the employee entrances in the building and where they typically congregate, alerting the system to re-identify them throughout the day as a non-customer. From there, the system reconciles the people count at an end-of-day marker. The result is a more accurate person count with better data that you can build your business decisions around. 

Heat Mapping 

Video security systems equipped with heat mapping offer another way for you to get the most out of your people counting solution. 

Heat mapping recognizes high-traffic areas around your stores, or hot spots. These hot spots can show you how customers tend to move throughout your location, as well as where they tend to typically stop. If you’re placing sales fixtures throughout your business, you’ll be able to see whether these initiatives are working at drawing customers in. If not, you can try out different placements throughout the store, or if another sale should be tried. You can also see if your business is set up to be the most convenient for customers to move through and reorganize accordingly. 

As well as that, heat maps can be an excellent way to build specific conversion rates during sales. If you see a certain number of people congregating around a fixture, you can then use that data to inform your conversion rate and see if your sales initiative was truly successful or not. 

Monitoring dwell time with heat maps provides unparalleled insight into customer journey time and can aid you as you seek to continually optimize your business’ operations. 

Find a Complete People Counting Solution with OpenEye 

OpenEye Web Services (OWS) cloud video solution helps businesses everywhere get accurate people counts to strengthen their workplace efficiency. 

Operational Analytics in OWS (powered by Wobot.ai) builds accurate people counts with employee exclusion and person recognition to get you the best data to structure your operations around. Heat mapping can additionally be leveraged to track customer journey throughout your store and identify trends for better scheduling and customer engagement. 

To learn more about how OpenEye’s powerful AI-based video analytics gets you accurate people counts, book a demo with us now.