Beacons help developers and brands create new experiences on mobile. We’ve already seen a lot of amazing applications which wouldn’t be possible without iBeacon. Yet beacons are not only used to push content. If you already have an app, you can use the Estimote platform to not only gather relevant information about how your customers engage with the physical environment around them, but also leverage these insights to enrich their experience.
Start with the basics
In every how-to article and post about making data-driven decisions, data seems to be clear-cut. Metrics increase steadily week over week, exponential curves are visible from a mile away, and every product change is immediately surfaced in the data. It’s only when you dive into your own charts that you realize how difficult it is to find traces of signal in all the noise. It’s true for A/B testing email campaigns, evaluating new UI flows, and yes, understanding information gathered through beacons as well. That’s why before you write the first line of code enabling Estimote analytics, you should ask yourself: what information are you looking for? What hypothesis do you want to validate?
Let’s assume you have a large store and a widely distributed app. There are tons of things you can measure with beacons. For example, if you create a heatmap of foot traffic and then install new signage: does it impact traffic distribution? You can check which section has the longest dwell time. Maybe it means people can’t find what they’re looking for and a change in layout is needed. Of course, analytics isn’t limited to retail stores: museums or airports can also take advantage of real-world analytics too. And just imagine the potential of deploying beacons in an industrial setting: how much time and money can be saved by improving asset tracking in warehouses?
It can be tempting to try measuring all these data points at once or even come up with more and more tests and launch them together. But to make the best use of the power hidden in data, begin by focusing on a single thing and then iterate depending on the results. Follow the PDCA cycle (plan-do-check-act) and you won’t fall into the trap of generating more noise than signal.
Not pictured: how data actually looks like
Dig into the data
Let’s say you already have a well-distributed app and you want to delve into analyzing foot traffic in your venue–whether it’s a retail store, restaurant chain, or industrial warehouse. Beacons will be helpful, especially bundled with the analytics API we released earlier this year. The most important part of Estimote analytics is that the basic unit for all measurements are beacon regions. A region can comprise a single beacon or 4 billion, so this approach gives you the flexibility to choose what and how you want to measure. Taking an example in a museum, you can create a separate region for each exhibition. Or if you’re running a larger venue, define a single region for each floor and see which exhibition is most popular with visitors. Keep in mind that iOS limits the number of regions you can simultaneously monitor to 20 regions. This means that you’ll either need to stick to this region limit or find a way to shuffle regions. Some methods for dynamic switching include GPS data (e.g., if you have restaurants in San Francisco and New York, you can deactivate monitoring for east coast venues when you detect that your user is physically present on the west coast) or time-based triggers (e.g., in a retail store, activate only regions in aisles with discounted products and then compare different promotions).
At the same time, collecting data from beacons is not limited to region monitoring. You can still leverage ranging to get more granular insight into visitor behavior. After your app’s users enter a region, you can use ranging analytics to find out exactly which beacons they approach. It’s very useful for heat mapping and tracing traffic patterns. Keep in mind that ranging should only be used works if the app is running in the foreground, so if your goal is data collection, you must offer consumer value to drive active engagement with your mobile experiences, not just by triggering actions in the background.
Another data point you can track with Estimote analytics is number of visits. Like Google Analytics, you have the option of differentiating between visits and unique visitors. Depending on your venue type, the healthy ratio of newcomers and known customers will be different, and employing analytics will help with finding the sweetspot. Assume you run a chain of restaurants and have a popular loyalty app. After integrating it with beacon-based analytics, you notice one of the locations has a much higher rate of returning diners. Maybe this indicates that the staff is providing great service and deserve a bonus? However, assuming that the traffic from word of mouth is also high, you would want to look for a spike in the overall number of visits as well. If that isn’t the case, maybe the unusual rate of returning customers is a sign of something else. For example, maybe your Facebook ad failed to attract new customers or that the location is inconvenient.
Ready for some number crunching? Read about how to enable Estimote analytics in this blog post.
Privacy first
We cannot stress enough how important it is to defend your customers’ privacy. Always inform them about the data you’re gathering and how it adds to the overall experience. Transparency is key even in ideal cases, like Google’s use of reCAPTCHA to digitize old books and manuscripts. Also, it’s not bad to leverage data for commercial purposes, as long as it improves the customer experience. A great example of that is Amazon: they drive a ton of revenue by upselling you on products they know you want.
Ultimately, the customer should always have the ability to opt in to data collection. At Estimote, we’re working hard to make sure that developers using our technology prioritize privacy. And the iBeacon standard itself is opt-in by design. That being said, you should still go the extra mile to assuage any concerns your customers might have. For example, create your own UI/UX that explains how and why you need permission in the first place.
Like this
Data is a valuable tool to understanding customer behavior and it’s amazing that beacons allow us to derive even more information from the physical world. Making sense of all of this, however, can be tricky. It’s essential to approach beacon analytics with a clear strategy, testable hypothesis, and an emphasis on customer value. Keep these principles in mind and you won’t get lost!
Wojtek Borowicz, Community Evangelist at Estimote