The perfect store tracking data collection would be costless, lossless, highly-accurate, would require no effort to deploy, would track every customer journey with high-precision, would differentiate associates and shoppers and provide shopper demographics along with easy opt-out and a minimal creep factor.

We’re not in a perfect world.

In my last post, I summarized in-store data collection systems across the dimensions that I think matter when it comes to choosing a technology: population coverage, positional accuracy, journey tracking, demographics, privacy, associate data collection and separation, ease of implementation and cost. At the top of this post, I summarized how each technology fared by dimension.

As you can see, no technology wins every category, so you have to think about what matters most for your business and measurement needs.

Here’s our thinking about when to use each technology for store tracking:

Camera: Video systems provide accurate tracking for the entire population along with shopper demographics. On the con-side, they are hard to deploy, very expensive, provide sub-standard journey measurement and no opt-out mechanism. From our perspective, camera makes the most sense in very small foot-print stores or integrated into a broader store measurement system where camera is being used exclusively for total counting and demographics.

WiFi: If only WiFi tracking worked better what a wonderful world it would be. It’s nearly costless and there’s almost no effort to deploy. It can differentiate shoppers and Associates and it provides an opt-out mechanism. Unfortunately, it doesn’t provide the accuracy necessary to useful measurement in most retail situations. If you’re an airport or an arena or a resort, you should seriously consider WiFi tracking. But for most stores, the problems are too severe to work around. With store WiFi, you lose tracking on your iPhone shoppers and you get less coverage on all devices. Worse, the location accuracy isn’t good enough to place shoppers in a reasonable store location. It’s easy to fool yourself about this. It’s free. It’s easy. What could go wrong? But keep two things in mind. First, bad data is worse than no data. Making decisions on bad data is a surefire way to screw up. Second, most of the cost of analytics is people not technology. When you give your people bad tools and bad data, they spend most of their time trying to compensate. It just isn’t worth it.

Passive Sniffer (iViu): There’s a lot to like with this system and that’s why they are – by far – our most common go to solution in traditional store settings. iViu devices provide full journey measurement with good enough accuracy. They cover most of the population and what they miss doesn’t feel significantly biased. The devices are inexpensive and easy to install, so full-fleet measurement is possible and PoC’s can be done very inexpensively. They do a great job letting us differentiate and measure Associates and they provide a reasonable opt-out mechanism for shoppers. Even if this technology doesn’t win in most categories, it provides “good-enough” performance in almost every category.

Combining Solutions

This isn’t necessarily an all or nothing proposition. You can integrate these technologies in ways that (sorta) give you the best of both worlds. We often recommend camera-on-entry, for example, even when we’re deploying an iViu solution. Why? Well, camera-on-entry is cheap enough to deploy, it provides demographics, and it provides a pretty accurate total count. We can use that total to understand how much of the population we’re missing with electronic detection and, if the situation warrants it, we can true-up the numbers based on the measured difference.

In addition, we see real value in camera-based display tracking. Without a very fine-grained RFID mesh, electronic systems simply can’t do display interaction tracking. Where that’s critical, camera is the right point solution. In fact, that’s part of what we demoed at the Capgemini Applied Innovation Exchange last week. We used iViu devices for the overall journey measurement and Intel cameras for display interaction measurement.

Similarly, in large public spaces we sometimes recommend a mix of WiFi and iViu or camera. WiFi provides the in-place full journey measurement that would be too expensive to get at any other way. But by deploying camera at choke-points or iViu in places where we need more accurate positional data, we can significantly improve overall collection and measurement without incurring unreasonable costs.

Summing Up

In a very real sense, we have no dog in this hunt. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say we back every dog in this hunt We don’t make hardware. We don’t make more money on one system than another. We just want the easiest, best path to getting the data we need to drive advanced analytics. Both camera systems and WiFi have the potential to be better store tracking solutions with improvements in accuracy and cost. We follow technology developments closely and we’re always hoping for better, cheaper, faster solutions. And there are times right now when using existing WiFi or deploying cameras is the right way to go. But in most retail situations, we think the iViu solution is the right choice.

And the fact that their data flows seamlessly into DM1 in both batch and – with Version 2 – real-time modes? From your perspective, that should be a big plus.

Open data systems are a huge advantage when it comes to planning out your data collection strategy. And finding the right measurement software to drive your analytics is – when you get right down to it – the decision that really matters.

And the good news? That’s the easiest decision you’ll ever have to make. Because there’s really nothing else out there that’s even remotely competitive to DM1.