Foursquare offers Analytics product for retailers, multi-location brands

Continuing its transformation into a data company, this week Foursquare announced Foursquare Analytics, “a dynamic foot traffic dashboard for brands.” The company said that its beta partners for the product included Taco Bell, TGI Fridays, H&M and Lowe’s.

The product is a benchmarking and audience measurement tool to enable retailers, QSR chains and others with physical locations to understand trends in same-store visits and across chains. The data can also be used for competitive intelligence, to explore “share of visits” in particular markets or categories and to identify demographic visitation patterns:

It’s a dashboard for insights on chain-level foot-traffic performance that can be easily compared to a competitive set and to the broader industry. It provides unprecedented metrics that measure loyalty, reveal demographic insights, and uncover sources of acquisition and loss. It allows analysts to have a precise understanding of changing store visit patterns and share of visits from a competitive set. Like every product within the Foursquare suite, Foursquare Analytics is powered by our industry-leading location intelligence.

The same methodology that allows Foursquare to deliver this information to customers is used to determine online-to-offline attribution and to create audience segments based on real-world behavior. It’s essentially another “productizing” of what Foursquare has been doing with location intelligence since its pivot.

These analytics capabilities were on display recently in Foursquare’s traffic and demographic analysis of retail store closings and their impact on the competitive landscape.

Many of Foursquare’s competitors and companies in the broader location intelligence segment offer similar visitation data analysis capabilities, including Placed, PlaceIQ, xAd, NinthDecimal, UberMedia, Factual, Euclid Analytics and others. Regardless, the data is extremely valuable, and all multi-location brands should be using it to understand their customers and competitors.

About The Author

Greg Sterling

Greg Sterling is a Contributing Editor at Search Engine Land. He writes a personal blog, Screenwerk, about connecting the dots between digital media and real-world consumer behavior. He is also VP of Strategy and Insights for the Local Search Association. Follow him on Twitter or find him at Google+.