Why Offline Still Feels Like a “Black Box”

Online businesses live in the age of transparency. Every button, banner, or user action is tracked, logged, and analyzed. These data points help companies understand audience behavior and preferences, monitor trends, and continuously optimize their marketing performance.

In offline retail, the picture is completely different. For most supermarkets, malls, and other stores, the only reliable metric is still revenue at the cash register. Most businesses also have entrance traffic counters (which do not provide reliable numbers). Everything else remains invisible: who entered, how long they stayed inside, or how they moved through space. Compared to e-commerce, that’s decades behind.

Over the past few years, the retail industry has become aware of this gap. Businesses are trying new technologies to understand their audiences and make decisions based on real data. This article reviews key approaches to offline audience analytics and compares their effectiveness.

Traffic Counting Methods

1. Receipt-Based Counting

Sales analysis is the most basic tool available to any offline business, yet it offers a very limited picture of customer behavior. It only shows the final stage of the sales funnel and says nothing about how long customers stayed in the store or whether they came alone or with friends or family.

Even loyalty program data is often misleading. It’s common for several family members or friends to share one loyalty card, so all purchases are attributed to a single demographic portrait. That distorts audience data and makes it unreliable.

Principle: analysis of POS data, number of transactions per hour, or per day.

Advantages:

• Accurate tracking of sales and revenue.

• Already integrated into existing systems.

• Useful for measuring sales performance and dynamics.

Disadvantages:

• Ignores visitors who didn’t make a purchase.

• No behavioral insights inside the store.

• Not reliable demographic data.

• Groups are counted as one buyer.

2. Manual Counting

This simple method seems reliable but rarely is. Human counters can only capture short time windows, can’t distinguish unique visitors or repeat visits, and are prone to errors. Even with perfect attention, you only get raw footfall numbers without demographics or behavioral insights.

Principle: employees or hired auditors count visitors manually during the day, sometimes using tablets or clickers.

Advantages:

• Easy to start — no equipment needed.

• Suitable for pilots or short-term tests.

Disadvantages:

• Labor-intensive and expensive over time.

• Human error: fatigue, distraction, and inconsistency.

• No data on unique visitors, demographics, or movement.

• Not scalable or continuous.

3. Entrance Counters

Entrance counters are one of the most common tools for traffic measurement. They use an infrared beam stretched across the entrance: when it’s broken, a customer entrance is counted. It’s simple, but it has major flaws — it can’t tell whether one or several people walked through, can’t identify unique visitors or staff, and provides no demographic or behavioral data.

More advanced ceiling-mounted sensors can better detect group movement but still can’t distinguish repeat visitors or employees, nor can they analyze audience profiles.

Principle: infrared, laser, or thermal sensors detect entries and exits.

Advantages:

• Easy to install, low cost.

• Basic understanding of traffic volumes.

Disadvantages:

• Counts passages, not unique individuals.

• Inaccurate for groups, strollers, or luggage.

• No data on who entered, where they went, or how they behaved.

• Hard to connect with POS conversion data.

4. Video Analytics

Video analytics is the newest and most advanced approach to offline retail analytics. It accurately counts unique visitors, analyzes audience demographics, and tracks in-store behavior: such as dwell time, movement maps, and interactions with products or screens.

Modern video analytics systems are fully anonymous, collect no personal data, and comply with privacy regulations.

Principle: cameras capture visitor flows; AI algorithms analyze unique visitors, behavior, and audience characteristics.

Advantages:

• Counts unique visitors.

• Demographics: gender and age.

• Movement maps, time heat maps, queues, and average dwell time.

• Staff detection and analytics of staff presence.

• Conversion tracking (visitor → buyer) through POS integration.

• Fully anonymous and compliant with privacy protection laws (like GDPR, CCPA, LGPD).

• Integration with digital signage and POS materials for audience-based targeting and engagement analysis.

• Combines analytics and content management in one system, saving infrastructure costs.

Disadvantages:

• Requires more equipment for complex scenarios.

• Higher initial investment than basic counters.

Comparison of traffic counting methods

Implementing Video Analytics for Traffic Counting

Like any technology, video analytics requires planning and investments, but it delivers far more value than older tools. Key steps to ensure success:

Understanding Goals and Data Handling Process

Before deploying an analytics system, ask the right questions:

• What insights do you want to gain? For example, how visitors move through the store or how they use specific zones.

• Do your locations already have marketing channels that can connect to analytics? For example, digital signage, LED walls, or POS screens.

• How will you use the data? For example, refine buyer personas for online campaigns or to measure campaign effectiveness.

• Can you integrate the new analytics with your existing data systems? Most solutions include dashboards, but you’ll gain more value by connecting audience analytics to other data sources (like sales data, ongoing campaigns, weather, staff schedule, etc.)

Installation and Setup

Video analytics requires installing cameras and data processors strategically to solve your specific business goals. But even though it may sound scary, remember, the hardware investment is one-time, while the ROI grows continuously as the system operates.

Marketing Team

Analytics only makes sense if your marketing team can act on it — adapting campaigns, testing new ideas, and responding to audience feedback.

Technical Support and Integration Partners

At DISPL, we’re proud of our global partner network of over 100 certified integrators. A trained, reliable partner accelerates implementation, prevents issues, and optimizes costs. If you contact us, we’ll connect you with the best local partner for your project. If no local partner is available, our team will guide your technicians through the setup remotely.

Use Cases: How Retailers Apply Audience Analytics

The main challenge for offline businesses is learning how to use large amounts of data to make better decisions and measure performance. Many teams still rely only on sales numbers, third-party studies, or gut feeling. This approach is inefficient, unreliable, and outdated.

Modern marketing requires data-driven personalization and timely action. That’s where video analytics makes a difference — delivering consistent, reliable insights that empower better decisions.

FMCG Retailers

A supermarket chain in Italy uses DISPL’s video analytics to profile shoppers, map visitor movement, and measure demand for in-store services.

For example, stores offered both staffed and self-service bread-slicing stations. Analytics revealed that most customers preferred self-service — traffic there was significantly higher. Based on this, the retailer decided to stop investing in staffed stations and saved costs.

The client now plans to expand video analytics use: integrating it with digital signage for targeted content and using it for promotion of new in-store cafés aimed at specific age groups.

Shopping Malls

Another example: Adboard Media, a screen network operator in Cyprus, manages displays in two major shopping malls. Using audience analytics, they know exact visitor numbers, demographics, and engagement for each screen. This allows them to charge higher ad rates and provide advertisers with reliable reports, building trust and long-term partnerships.

While screens can be owned by a mall or a partner, the key benefit of such businesses is the large number of shopping-minded visitors. Monetizing this audience through data-driven digital signage and ad sales is a no-brainer and a high ROI business opportunity.

Consumer Electronics and Beauty Retailers

Unlike FMCG, these stores often use brand zones, where each brand has its own space, promoters, and marketing efforts. Brands need to understand the store’s audience overall and their zone’s specific traffic: who are visitors, their conversion rates, and what other products attract their attention. Retailers, in turn, want higher overall traffic, satisfied brands, and stronger marketing ROI for everyone.

Video analytics solves this for both sides. Retailers can analyze visitor demographics, movement, and staff presence in key areas. The same data is valuable to multiple brands, meaning the retailer can monetize analytics by selling insights to partners and pairing it with ad sales on in-store screens for additional ROI. See our case study with largest consumer electronics retailer in Greece, Kotsovolos.

Conclusion

Most offline retailers still rely on outdated and incomplete data sources — entrance counts and sales reports. In contrast, audience video analytics provides a richer, more precise view of real visitor behavior.

Solutions like DISPL’s Visitor Insights reveal audience demographics, unique visitor counts, movement between zones, and conversion to purchase. Integrated with digital signage, they also measure views, engagement, and deliver real-time targeted content based on actual audience data.

Video analytics gives offline businesses – from FMCG retailers to shopping malls and specialty stores – the power to measure, understand, and grow. And all-in-one platforms like DISPL, combining audience analytics, digital signage, and ad sales tools, delivering maximum ROI while reducing integration costs.