Online Analytics for the Physical World

By Shaun Abrahamson on June 29, 2008

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Knowing what people say and knowing what they do, can be a powerful combination. Online marketing has capitalized on this via rich analytics to look at what people are saying or searching for and ultimately what they are buying. Web analytics is letting online marketers sort through the differences between what people say they do and what they actually do.

This is the core of online marketing’s advantage over traditional media. But what is happening where most of us still live? i.e the physical world.

Well, we have various profiling tools, such as affinity cards. So we can figure out how people are spending. But how did we land up in the store that day? A coupon code perhaps? We cant really be sure. We know things like 12m people are supposed to have visited this location.  But then we don’t really know where they went or where they came from (we think perhaps 25% are international based on surveys, for example).

But this is starting to change. Mutopo is working with one client to track in store movement, using signals from cell phones. The approach lets us show a location owner how people move around the space, not unlike what I might see from online analytics – navigation paths, entrance and exit points, time spent at certain locations etc. And so now, I can make changes in reality and measure the responses, not just changes in sales.

While we are working on a very local scale, we were excited to learn about Prof Tony Jebara’s new project, Sense Networks. Tony and his team are harvesting a variety of data sets to understand what people are doing – they are, in effect bringing online analytics into the real world.

Things like the most searched items on Google Trends might have realwold analogs such as the most visited restaurants. Or conversion reports might now be possible from outdoor campaigns, as you can get a real sense of the number of people who might have walked past a specific location.

The image on the left shows an example application to show the “hotspots” in San Francisco. These are literally the places you want to be if you are asking the question: where is everyone going tonight? Yes, its realtime. You can learn more about this app at Citysense.

It might be possible to know for sure how many more people in New York City have chosen to bike to work. I can start to see if more people are going to the new Ikea in Brooklyn instead of alternatives in New York City, such as Bed Bath and Beyond or the Container Store. Where I might have used Google Analytics to benchmark my site, now I can do the same for my store.

And we can now play what-if, in the real world. What if we:

• change the layout of the store?
• place new promotional signage at the hallway?
• invest in signage alongside the highway?
• purchase the locaton on 26th and 5th?
• notice that more people are starting to cycle in NYC?
• see more people dining out in a new area of town?
• see more people going to Trader Joe’s than Wholefoods?

Its feels like we are on the verge of a significant change in how data from cell phones, GPS devices and the like can be analyzed in new and interesting ways. Good luck to Tony and the team at Sense Networks. We cant wait to see what people are going to do with your analysis.

Posted in: Quant | Tagged: data mining, gps data, location based services, MIT, mobile data, Proximity Marketing, reality analytics, reality mining, sense networks, trends | 1 Comment