How Wi-Fi Analytics is revolutionizing Marketing and redefining Privacy
Imagine that you are shopping in your favorite store and you notice that some of the store employees were following your every move while you shop. Whenever you stop to look at a display, they track how long you stand there and jot it down. They follow your every move from the time you enter the store until the time you leave documenting everything you do.
Most people would feel uncomfortable if this happened, and it would likely cause us never to visit that store again.
Well, unbeknownst to most of us, there are tools in place today that are doing precisely what I described and more. Instead of following you with a person, they follow you with a revolutionary new technology called Advanced Wi-Fi Analytics.
What is Advanced Wi-Fi Analytics?
Advanced Wi-Fi Analytics is a set of tools that collect and analyze data from Wi-Fi networks. These tools collect KPIs like visitor traffic, dwell time, and conversion likelihood. It can track & improve marketing campaigns in real-time, improving overall ROI.
These tools help businesses know more about their visitors, such as who they are and how they behave. Advanced Wi-Fi Analytics is revolutionizing modern marketing and improving customer experiences.
Many of these tools are in use with our consent as a request to ‘opt-in’ to participate. There are other aspects to Wi-Fi Analytics that are happening behind the scenes and without our knowledge. Aside from providing key Marketing insights, these new tools are also redefining Privacy.
How does Wi-Fi Analytics work?
Every smart device has a unique identifier called a MAC address from a smartphone, laptop, smartwatch, or tablet. When your device is in the vicinity of a Wi-Fi network, it sends out signals in search of a Wi-Fi access point. The MAC address is recorded into a database when the access point detects the device.
By collecting the MAC address, businesses can track and measure specific information about the device, such as whether you are a first-time visitor, a repeat visitor, the day and time you visited, and how long you stayed there. This data is valuable as it gives a clear picture of your business store’s foot traffic and loyalty rates.
Top 5 Methods of Wi-Fi Analytics
Analytics are only valuable if you analyze the data—the more insights, the better, as long as the correct data is harnessed and targeted. Choosing which analytics to use ultimately depends on the purpose, they will serve.
1) Guest Wi-Fi
Guest Wi-Fi is the free Wi-Fi you get in public spaces like restaurants, shopping malls, and cafes. In today’s connected world, having reliable Guest Wi-Fi is almost a requirement. Once customers connect their device to Wi-Fi, they tend to start surfing on the Internet.
Business owners assess how their customer use their Wi-Fi with Advanced Wi-Fi Analytics. It can provide critical insights into how many new customers vs. returning customers or how many sessions during a given time does a customer use.
Despite these valuable insights, Guest Wi-Fi alone provides the least amount of marketing data because it does not collect specific information.
2) Captive Portal
Captive Portals appear as Wi-Fi splash pages but with more intelligence. Typically Wi-Fi networks request customers to log in using their email address or social media accounts. When combined with other Wi-Fi analytics data, this data can provide a detailed description of customers’ demographic information and usage patterns.
Engaging Wi-Fi Analytics through Social Media provides companies with data about a customer’s profile, gender, birthday, and more. Businesses conduct targeted marketing that is customized to each customer once you have these insights. The tools can help increase customer loyalty and increase their Social Media influence.
Some Wi-Fi Analytics companies have designed their Captive Portals to connect automatically after your first engagement. Once you have chosen to ‘opt-in’ one time to the Guest Wi-Fi, the connection will automatically engage upon future visits.
A Captive Portal system provides businesses with all of Guest Wi-Fi Analytics advantages but with added benefits. The Captive portal offers a more in-depth insight into who their customers are as a group and improve targeted marketing. For instance, if a business realizes that most of their customers are women in their 20’s, they can modify their marketing campaigns accordingly to appeal to this demographic.
3) Loyalty Applications
Loyalty Applications take all of the benefits of the previous items but add the intelligence of software. These applications provide the same services of Wi-Fi and Social Media engagement but also includes integration with other systems.
For instance, many customers go to brick and mortar stores as a showroom for their online shopping. Some loyalty programs have built-in intelligence that can detect if you connect to a website like Amazon. The Loyalty programs can then automatically send you a coupon as an incentive to make your purchase in-store.
Another use case for Loyalty Applications is integration with point of sale systems. One of the world’s largest coffee companies takes advantage of these apps. They offer incentives to connect store payment to the loyalty applications on your phone. They typically provide incentives for you to load credits into the application. Not only is this a benefit by having your money in-hand sooner, but this also allows them to correlate your data to how much you spend, what you are spending it on, and how much time you spend in-store.
Loyalty applications offer endless integration options across other platforms. When used in conjunction with the next two tools is when the questions of Privacy start to take hold.
4) Beacons/Bluetooth Low Energy Technology
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology uses the Bluetooth connection on your phone combined with a loyalty application and BLE devices know as ‘beacons.’
BLE beacons can be installed anywhere and are as small as a quarter. The app can evaluate the information given by signals from the BLE beacons. If you want the app to send a message when a customer gets close to a specific product, you can program the app to do that.
For example, if your local grocery store promotes pasta, they place a beacon in a stand-up display for pasta. While you are shopping using the coupons in your loyalty app, you stop in front of the show. The beacon would recognize your device by way of blue tooth. The Loyalty Application would then trigger a coupon in your app for the pasta and the pasta sauce. All of this because you stopped in front of the display.
One would have to admit that as cool as this Technology is… It is still a little bit creepy.
5) Location Analytics
Location analytics tools are where the questions about Privacy come into play. Whether you have connected to the Guest Wi-Fi or not, Location Analytics can collect information about you.
How ‘Location Analytics’ works are like signal triangulation positioning used on wireless LTE networks. LTE positioning can accurately detect your position to within about 500 meters or so. Wi-Fi Location Analytics in Wi-Fi is much more accurate and can report your location to within 3 to 6 meters or less.
The software can tell whether you are in the shoe department vs. cosmetics. Furthermore, it can also track how long you stayed in each area, also known as ‘dwell time.’ Location Analytics can be useful to estimate if you purchased by monitoring how long you stood at the check-out.
The applications for these tools are virtually limitless. The diagram below is an example of standard location analytics data from a popular Wi-Fi platform that I run in my home. The user data captured here represents anyone near my home whose devices are within range of my Wi-Fi signal. As you can see, the platform can tell ‘Visitors’ vs. ‘Passerby’ based on signal strength. Dwell time, and customer Loyalty/frequency are also measured.
Big Data location services like Google Analytics or Foursquare can then cross-reference this data. These tools can show your activity before arriving in a location and where you went after you leave by learning which business’s customers visit, creating Co-branding opportunities.
The possibilities are endless.
Benefits of Wi-Fi Analytics for Marketing
In the end Advanced Wi-fi Analytics tools are changing the very face of retail. These tools offer limitless benefits for both business and customers.
Customers see the benefits of receiving marketing tailored to their specific interests while reaping the rewards for loyalty and deeper discounts.
Businesses see significant benefits because Advanced Wi-Fi Analytics provides a deeper understanding of consumer demand. Wi-Fi Analytics provides relevant customer insights that companies can leverage to edge over their digital age competitors.
By targeting customers intelligently, the days of creating a marketing campaign based on guess-work or gut feeling are a thing of the past. Understanding who your ideal customer is, their behavior, likes, and dislikes allows businesses to segment consumers into different personas.
Once segmented, businesses can then send targeted marketing messages to each specific segment for better engagement. This method can significantly improve marketing results and bring down costs.
Studies state that targeted marketing campaigns are 50% more effective than non-targeted campaigns. Tracking ROI of individual marketing campaigns can help you to optimize all campaigns launched.
Impact on Privacy
Privacy is the most crucial concern of Wi-Fi analytics. As of this article’s release, the legality is a gray area as Wi-Fi Analytics service providers claim that MAC addresses aren’t personally identifiable information (PII), while EU and US raw regulators have hinted that they are Personal Information (PI).
Consumers’ Private Information
Consumers have raised concerns that Wi-Fi Location Analytics tools are collecting personal information without their consent. Moreover, most consumers are not even aware that companies are capturing their data.
According to a survey by OpinionLab, 8 out of 10 consumers do not want stores to track their movements. 43% of consumers are less likely to purchase from a favorite store if it has implemented a tracking program.
Children’s Privacy
Securing children’s digital Privacy is another crucial concern. In 2018, TikTok paid $5.7 million to settle FTC allegations of collecting children’s personal information under 13. Later, in 2019, Google paid $200 million to settle FTC claims of YouTube violating children’s privacy laws.
Conclusion
Wi-Fi analytics offers endless opportunities for how businesses can leverage digital technology. Business owners can harness experiences and insights that were previously unimaginable. With Wi-Fi analytics, physical stores can have the same advantage as the e-commerce industry for years.
The technology provides detailed information about consumer movement and behavior. Actionable insights that businesses can use to enhance customer satisfaction and increase profits result from processing this raw data.
There are challenges related to data privacy and security that can affect Wi-Fi analytics in the business. Government regulations must be updated often to allow the adoption of Wi-Fi analytics and digital transformation in general.
1 Comment
So crazy how much this stuff can do without our even knowing?!?!