The retail metrics glossary: every footfall KPI, explained
The vocabulary of physical retail performance in one place: what each metric means, how it is calculated, and what decision it exists to support.
Retail analytics has a vocabulary problem: every vendor defines the words slightly differently, and half the industry’s arguments dissolve once the definitions are on the table. This glossary sets out the metrics we deliver, what each one means, how it is calculated, and which decision it exists to support. Definitions follow our metric catalogue.
Footfall / visitor count
The number of people entering a defined space in a period. The foundation everything else is built on, and on its own, almost never enough: a falling count can mean a weaker location or a weaker offer, and only the surrounding metrics say which. Counted as totals, in/out, and unique visitors (distinct people rather than visits).
Passers-by
People who passed the store without entering: the audience still in reach. Measured outside the entrance, it turns the street into a denominator and makes the location’s potential visible.
Capture rate
Capture rate = visitors entering ÷ passers-by. The window-and-location metric: of everyone who walked past, how many did the frontage pull in? Low capture with strong passing traffic is a facade, signage or window problem, and the cheapest conversion lift most stores never measure.
Conversion rate
Conversion = transactions ÷ visitors entering. The store’s own performance with the traffic it already has, connected through POS integration. Read hourly, it exposes when the floor is understaffed; read per store, it shows which locations sell and which merely host visitors. The full funnel logic lives on in-store conversion rate.
Dwell time
How long visitors stay, overall or per zone. The engagement signal: rising dwell with flat conversion suggests interest the checkout experience is losing; near-zero dwell in a paid-for zone means the space is decoration. Deep dive: dwell time explained.
Zone flows, paths & heatmaps
Where visitors go, in what order, and which areas run hot or cold, drawn on your own floor plan. The layout and merchandising metric family: it shows what the heatmap shows, which shelves the route never reaches, and where the anchor placements actually anchor.
Occupancy
How many people are inside right now, against the capacity you set. Operational rather than analytical: live staffing triggers, safety limits, and the crowd alerts that fire before a queue becomes a review.
Benchmarking
Like-for-like comparison across stores, periods and campaigns, normalised so a big-city flagship and a small-town unit can be read on the same scale. The chain metric: it converts one good store into a playbook, which is the whole point of measuring an estate the same way everywhere.
Having the large flows we have is a challenge. We constantly strive to have as efficient a station as possible. With the help of reliable data from the new measurement system, we can better plan where different service functions or stores are to be located and how we can adapt doors or passages.
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between footfall and visitor count?
In practice they are used interchangeably for the number of people entering a space in a period. Strictly, footfall is the phenomenon and the visitor count is the measurement of it. The useful distinctions are elsewhere: total visits versus unique visitors, and visitors versus passers-by.
Which retail metric should a store start with?
Capture rate and conversion, together. Capture rate tells you whether the location and window do their job; conversion tells you whether the store does its job with those who enter. One metric without the other blames the wrong thing.
How are these metrics measured in practice?
Anonymous counting across the floor and at entrances: Wi-Fi for whole-space flows and dwell, sensors or LiDAR for exact in/out, POS integration for the transaction leg. Every metric in this glossary comes from the same privacy-first measurement described on our retail page.