Walkbase offers foot traffic patterns at retail stores

E-commerce sales online are growing rapidly, but even after a decade of rapid growth they constitute just 8% of total retail sales. What online retail has done, is to educate marketers in the benefits of detailed sales funnel analysis using tools like Google Analytics. With the release recently of Google Universal Analytics, Google is also enabling retailers to mix online data with other offline data such as point of sale transactions.

Walkbase has developed a solution for easily measuring consumer foot traffic patterns in retail stores. Using small, inexpensive sensors or approved Wi-Fi infrastructure, the solution detects Wi-Fi radio signals emitted by consumers' mobile phones. After hashing the Wi-Fi identifiers to ensure privacy, Walkbase uses sophisticated algorithms to provide analysis of foot traffic patterns, such as visitor trend, capture rate (percentage of passers by entering a store) and dwell time in a store.

Today Walkbase is launching the beta version of an integration with Google Universal Analytics, allowing retailers, brands and their agencies to select stores and to import the retail analytics data and compare side-by-side against marketing campaign data in Google Analytics. Comparing the two, as well as pre-campaign historical data, allows retailers to evaluate the effectiveness of campaigns and understand how well they bring customers in the door. As Walkbase CEO Tuomas Wuoti explains, “If a campaign is not performing, a retailer could understand if that is because it is not delivering a stream of consumers or whether they are coming and browsing at the store but decide not to buy – the latter being something that can be addressed by improving store operations and customer service.”

The Google Universal Analytics integration is available for free for selected Walkbase Retail Analytics customers.

Walkbase, an alumnus of the Startup Sauna program, also announces today that it has closed a seed round of funding, led by two Russian investors who see great potential in Russia and other markets for retail analytics services and who met the company during the Slush conference in Helsinki last November. Leonid Volkov, is startup adviser at Yandex, Russia's leading Internet search engine and Managing Director of the fund Projector Ventures. Leonid Gluzman is one of the leader's of Russia's daily deals industry, having founded and sold NadoVmeste.ru and led KupiKon.ru. The existing Finnish angel investors are now also joined by Jan Blomquist, member of the board of Life, the Nordic region’s leading retail chain for health food, wellness and lifestyle products.

Walkbase