Businesses have always wanted to gather as much data as they can on their potential clients. They have made use of many survey techniques to get to the bottom of the thinking and behaving patterns of their target audience. One such technique often invoked is called consumer immersion. It involves asking people in your business’ physical localities (such as shoppers at a retail store) questions relevant to their purchase decisions. This technique is useful to some extent but creates a disturbance in the purchasing experience of your customers.
However, a much more efficient and effective methodology has been invented thanks to the utilization of wireless internet networks that are offered by businesses. It is called ‘WiFi Analytics’.
Similar to analytics gathered on websites, the WiFi network installed in your business collects data about your customers. This can give you an amazing opportunity to learn about their purchasing habits, as well as view real-time stats on how many people use your WiFi — and how many are return visitors.

WiFi analytics are extremely easy to gather as many customers automatically connect to some form of guest WiFi network when they visit a business’ premises. And these analytics are highly effective as well and have brought radical changes in the data gathering industry.

What WiFi analytics can tell you about your visitors

Benefit 1: Unearth visitor behaviors
Even if someone’s WiFi is not connected, smart phones actively send out pings to detect and be in a ready state to connect to the available WiFi networks. On the receiving end, the access points of your WiFi device listen to pings that are being sent out. This helps the device to sense the location of the smart phone device. This feature that is built in smart phones helps businesses to measure foot traffic and analyze visitor behavior.
This locating tool can unearth several important questions such as: how many people visit a location? How many are unique visitors? How many pass but don’t stop? How many have been to the location before? How frequently do they visit? How much time do they spend on the location?

Benefit 2: Discover who visitors are

When visitors sign in to WiFi, businesses can collect useful information out from their phones. This could include names, emails, contact numbers as well as demographic data such as age, gender and language. They could also get access to what devices, browser and operating systems people use.
Businesses have also invented new compelling ways to get customer’s social media information. They offer easy access to WiFi networks via single click logins. For instance, customers can conveniently connect to the wifi network through their Facebook account, and the business can benefit from access to customer’s profile data.
This is extremely useful information as businesses can better understand their clientele. They can also use the information gathered to run more effective marketing campaigns that specifically target the studied groups that visit business locations.

Benefit 3: See how guest WiFi is used

Once visitors start surfing internet on a business’ WiFi, the business gets access to guest WiFi service analytics which makes it easy for businesses to monitor how guest WiFi is being used across all their locations. Guest analytics can tell a business what websites and applications are most popular in their locations. They can use this information to specify the channels to put their advertisements at and make their marketing attempts more successful.