Improving programmatic DOOH ad platforms with foot traffic data
Optimize programmatic Digital-Out-Of-Home ad billboards with cost effective & scalable foot traffic data signals.
Programmatic digital out-of-home (DOOH) - and in-store ads often use different signals to determine the price of the ads. Foot traffic (footfall) data from stores can give you vital info about when most visitors see the ad displays. However, this data is usually expensive to get. BestTime offers world-wide foot traffic data signals (based on smartphone GPS signals) as a low cost & scalable alternative to expensive new DOOH optimization technologies.
DOOH traditionally uses simple signals such as the time and weather. In recent years, sophisticated - but costly - techniques are used as signals for optimizing pricing. Smart billboards are using cameras with AI software to analyze foot traffic behavior nearby. While this is useful technology, there are high upfront costs to install these AI-enabled camera systems on each individual display (camera's also raise more privacy related questions).
Alternatively, for in-store advertising, Point-of-Sale (POS) systems of stores are often integrated to analyze when customers are most likely to shop. This method works also well, but is expensive to scale when having to create a custom integration with each individual shop.
Scalable, low-cost alternative
BestTime.app provides foot traffic (footfall) data for millions of points-of-interest (POI) around the globe. We are providing programmatic DOOH billboards with customized foot traffic signals through our software API. Signals can be based on a single point of interest like a store, or it can be based on multiple points of interest nearby, such as a nearby museum, park, gym, or restaurant.
Getting signals from all over the world is as simple as integrating the BestTime API once. Initial- and scaling costs are lower than those of AI powered cameras and individual store POS integrations. BestTime is even free to try.
The BestTime foot traffic data includes visitor forecasts for every hour of the week from Monday through Sunday. This forecast is based on visitor smartphone GPS signals at POI's in the past few weeks, and is displayed as a percentage from 0 to 100%. Herein indicates 100% the most busy hour of the week. This makes it possible to automate the pricing optimizations on a big scale without the need for expensive hardware.
Additionally, live foot traffic data is available for popular POIs. Based on live foot traffic percentages, we can tell how busy a POI is compared to the visits over the past week at this hour.
BestTime only provides relative foot traffic percentages. Absolute visitor numbers and seasonal visitor changes are not provided. The normalized foot traffic data percentages from BestTime are very useful in predicting when most visitors would see an ad. This allows advertisers to know at what time their ads are most effective and online DOOH platforms to know when ads are most valuable.
For more information visit the Besttime.app website, or try the New York foot traffic heatmap demo. You can also contact us for other questions how to integrate BestTime with your programmatic DOOH platform.
Frequently discussed topics
BestTime has foot traffic data for public POI's like stores, malls, restaurants, bars, clubs, gyms, supermarkets, train stations, museums, landmarks, parks, airports, and beaches. BestTime does not provide foot traffic data for custom areas like streets and city blocks.
BestTime does not only provide signals for individual POI's (we call them venues), but makes it possible to analyze POI's in whole areas. E.g. filter and show only the POI's in a specific area that are busy at a specific moment of the day. Or sort POI's on dwell time and user ratings.