Is the retail media’s focus on footfall justified or is it an out-dated habit that needs to be dropped now that high quality sales data is available?
A recent article in the Sheffield Telegraph proudly reported that the city centre’s footfall increased more in September than in 62 other cities, adding that this was likely to lead to stronger sales in the run up to Christmas.
While this conclusion seems reasonable, the article’s author did not mention the data on retail sales in Sheffield which was already available alongside the footfall data in the High Street Recovery Tracker, the source of the article’s footfall data. The tracker shows that while sales had also shown strong monthly growth, Sheffield’s overall sales recovery was actually weaker than most other cities, including larger cities such as Leeds, Manchester and Derby.
The Sheffield Telegraph article is not unusual. In the 14 months that Beauclair has been providing retail sales data to the tracker we have noticed that about half of the media coverage of the tracker focuses exclusively on footfall and does not mention sales data.
The danger of relying exclusively on footfall data as a measure of recovery can be shown in the case of Manchester city centre. Estimates vary but in August this year the tracker showed that footfall 40-50% below pre-lockdown levels (although Manchester’s footfall cameras showed only a 35%-25% drop). This sounds fairly disastrous until you look at retail sales levels, which were around 110% of pre-lockdown levels. In fact, sales in Manchester city centre in August 2021 were 5% above the same month in 2019, hardly a reason for despair.
Heart of Manchester Business Improvement District (BID) subscribes to Beauclair’s monthly service, which provides retail sales data to BIDs and local authorities. They receive data on sales, customer numbers, spend per customer and transaction values broken down by retail sector. We show where customers are coming from, their profile in terms of affluence and spend, and how each city’s performance compares to its peers. We can also monitor the sales impact of specific events such as festivals or street markets so that BIDs and local authorities can understand the return on investment into these events.
Manchester can see, for example, that it has recently out-performed other large cities and succeeded in attracting more customers from the broader city region and the rest of the UK, a stark contrast to earlier in the year. Manchester’s sales growth has been driven by significant increases in food and drink sales compared to 2019 and by the late summer even travel and accommodation had largely recovered. This is a far cry from what the footfall data might be seen to suggest.
So, should the media – along with BIDs and the local authorities – stop monitoring footfall data? After all, sales data is highly granular, can be obtained without investing in infrastructure such as cameras and is price competitive with other forms of data. Is footfall only a proxy for retail sales, a relic from the days when sales data was not available?
We at Beauclair believe that sales data should be a major data priority for BIDs and local authorities. After all, sales revenues are what keep city centre businesses alive, not simply people on the street outside. While footfall and other mobility data can complement sales data, and can help us understand how customers are using cities, it is important to not exclusively rely on footfall as this can give a misleading picture of how a city is performing.
The next step is to research into what accounts for the difference between the footfall and sales data, which should lead to a better understanding of the difference in spending patterns between commuters, shoppers and night-time visitors. This is something that we will be working on in the coming months.
Moving forward, we strongly encourage all local authorities, BIDs and the media to view the performance of city centres holistically, with both sales and complementary footfall data to enable them to see a complete picture of city recovery. This will help business owners, investors and policy-makers to improve their understanding of how our cities are performing and enable them to make informed decisions on how best to support cities in their economic recovery.