Retail Analytics and Store Viz

We also worked on this kind of analytics.  ...   Good points made, its all about context.

Retail Analytics and Store Visualization   by Gary Angel  In CustomerThink:

Making sense of behavioral data is always a challenge. Suppose I tell you that a shopper visited your store, spent fourteen minutes, lingered twice and had a single Associate interaction. That’s a lot of data, but in most respects, it’s deeply uninformative. What did the shopper care about? What were they interested in? What did they pass by?  What worked? What didn’t? You can’t even begin to formulate answers to those questions based on the data I described. 

I know, because I spent years trying and largely failing to do interesting analytics with metrics like these in the digital world. What’s missing from these metrics is the context. If you don’t know what was in the store at the place where the shopper lingered, you can’t attach meaning to the action. For in-store analytics, the basic context that gives meaning to the data is the store; specifically, what was there in the store at the place the visitor lingered. .... "