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August 24, 2023

Insights to Action Series [Part 8 – Visitor Insights]

Insights to Action Series
[Part 8 – Visitor Insights]

By Liz Emery, Senior Director, Product Marketing

Insights to Action Series [Part 8 – Visitor Insights]

Welcome back to Affinity’s “Insights to Action” blog series, exploring how to use Consumer Purchase Insights to solve complex business problems. Consumer Purchase Insights provides a complete, granular view of customer and prospect purchase behaviors, across and between brands and categories, to inform a wide array of growth strategies based on deeper audience understanding. This is the final piece of an 8-part series where we dive into different examples of how to gain insights into – who your consumers are, how they spend, and where they buy – to inspire meaningful action. If you want to read the first 7 blogs, click the links below.

Part 8: Visitor Insights

Visitor Insights are an analysis of the consumers who visit a brand or competitor location(s). As marketers, we are often asked questions about store health:

  • Why is one location performing better than another?
  • Why do stores in Chicago perform better than New York City?
  • If you rank all store locations from high visitation to low, what’s causing visitation differences?
  • How do you explain visitation variance in the same city?

Taking the time to understand the visitation behaviors of your brand buyers and category buyers provides insights into critical pieces of the puzzle to better explain, measure and predict the success of locations.

The Problem

Understanding customer visitation patterns is a key element of gauging the overall health of a business and market. Without the ability to understand how a market performs, at a category and personal brand level, a brand is at risk for poor investments. These insights not only support brands in strategy, but the real estate market as well.

Using Insights to Create an Action Plan

Top brands and real estate professionals know the answers to market health questions lie in the visitation data. Below is a snapshot of data analysis commonly run for general market insights and predictive modeling. These insights should be part of the foundation for all business decisions.

  • Demographics: Who lives there
  • Firm-A-Graphics: Who works there
  • Shop-A-Graphic: Retail activity in the market
  • Competition: Who else is in the market
  • Ingress/Egress: Traffic counts
  • Site Level Characteristics: Parking, co-tenants, signage, crime statistics, etc.
  • Market Maturity including operation issues

Affinity captures the daily consumer spending behavior of over 140 million credit and debit cards, representing over 8.8 billion annual transactions and $400 billion in annual spend. This data enables a variety of real estate and brand location insights for analytics. For example, Affinity can measure visitor activity, understanding who’s visiting the location, where they come from (in-market or visitor), where consumers are spending their money, and how much money they spend. This data is a critical piece of the puzzle that allows for the right analysis, no matter the goal.

Let’s dive into an example by geographic region. The table below illustrates the Sstate of Florida (can be drilled down by DMA, county, or ZIP code). The data reveals the shopping behaviors of those who visited Florida in April 2023. In the data we can see where visitors came from and what they spent their money on when they visited – across 800+ spending categories. These insights can be used by brands to understand where they should open or close a store, what partnerships they should make with complimentary brands and more.

Diving in further, we can zoom in on one of those categories – Amusement Parks and Carnivals to illustrate the distribution of visitor transactions by state.  These visitor insights can shape marketing strategies for amusement parks to determine the best markets for advertising to reduce media waste and improve return on investments.

Without understanding your customer’s visitation patterns, marketing becomes more of a guessing game. By using visitor insights, you can truly gauge the current and future success of your business locations & markets.

That wraps up Insights to Action Part 8 – Visitor Insights and the Insights to Action 8–part series! To learn more about Consumer Purchase Insights and how Affinity Solutions can help you drive business outcomes, reach out to sales@affinitysolutions.com.

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