Apart from making things look pretty, visual elements can impact your customers’ overall shopping experience. Digital signage is a powerful way of drawing clients in and providing personalised shopping recommendations.

Some benefits you can enjoy from digital signage include cost efficiency, enhanced user engagement, and increased sales. 

The most important benefit, however, is collecting analytical data that can help you develop business strategies. However, you need special equipment, including software, screens, and interactive devices, to collect and display various types of data.

Reliable digital signage software collects and stores information about your audience in a database. Analysing it allows businesses to adjust their campaigns and measure consumer engagement.

Most digital signage solutions use camera sensors to collect information such as the number of people that encounter your monitor, the time they spend viewing, body language, demographics, gestures, and more.

Businesses are constantly seeking innovative ways to use this information to adjust and tailor their marketing strategies to maximise effectiveness. It helps you improve content relevance and overall customer engagement.

This post will examine how digital signage analytics can help reveal valuable insights into customer behaviour. It’ll also discuss how you can use these insights to your benefit.

1. Tracking audience demographics

Some digital signage systems estimate the gender, age, and emotions of your viewers. They collect this information when customers interact with them, for example, simulation systems, which are popular in clothing boutiques.

They use cameras which focus on viewers and can decipher which part of the screen they focus on most and their reaction. A customer may like a dress and dislike the shoes in the simulation.

This allows you to design more interactive displays and make sections in demand more easily accessible. You can also find out why these specific areas are popular and what to do to improve other sections.

Demographic customer data can help you improve your business through:

Setting goals

Monitoring business growth in a specific location allows you to expand and reach more customers. The moment you understand what your customer groupings want, you can track their buying habits and develop new products that meet the needs of an aging group.

Targeted advertising

This data helps you to narrow your audience and develop strategies that speak directly to them. It enables you to increase the chances of capturing their attention through your advertisements.

2. Measuring the effectiveness of content

Digital signage technology is a business investment to boost sales and increase customer engagement. Digital signage analytics allow you to understand whether your marketing strategy works and what to do to maximise effectiveness.

Here are the main KPIs to help measure the success of digital signage campaigns:

Views

This represents the number of people that look at your content. For example, if you run a retail store, digital signage can use cameras and sensors to capture the people who look at a specific screen.

For those screens placed at entrances, the systems mainly calculate this metric by how many people enter your store daily.

Customer engagement rate

Those digital signage screens with touch capabilities allow customer engagement. They can include links or videos you have to click to watch.

The rate customers interact with your digital signage systems shows how effective a campaign is. It also informs business owners whether it is likely to increase purchases.

Conversion

Conversion focuses on sales and is measured by analysing the mechanism you use to get customers to make a purchase and determine the role your screen content plays.

Most systems use QR-code visits, feedback gathering, and screen-enabled internet links. The conversion rate mainly indicates the number of viewers that take a desired action after interacting with digital signage.

3. Calculating dwell time

Dwell time refers to the seconds or minutes an individual spends looking at your screen. It is one of the most challenging things to achieve when creating a digital signage strategy.

The conscious human mind can process up to 40 bits of data per second. This means it takes 1.5 to 4.6 seconds for your brain to focus more on the information one is looking at. For some people, it can take as little as 0.7 to 0.9 seconds.

Some digital signage systems use advanced camera sensor technology to monitor individuals as they look at your screens. 

This information helps you identify whether your digital signage displays are captivating and if the display information is well-received.

Knowing the dwell time can help you identify flaws in your strategies. You may be promoting products that are unlikely to sell or using inappropriate images or videos.

If you want to increase your customer’s dwell time, you must:

Place your screens in ideal locations

Screen placement is vital in helping collect the most appropriate and critical data. For example, if you are promoting a product on sale, place your screen near the product’s display or move the display towards the screen.

Create engaging and well-designed content

Your design allows you to define, refine, and boost your marketing strategy. Your content will naturally attract people if you use infographics, quizzes, polls, videos, and illustrative images.

Make your videos look excellent and sound fabulous. They should also be easy to understand and make sense to increase the dwell time.

Encourage your target audience to take action

When creating digital signage content, ask yourself what reaction you will likely get from your audience. This way, you can persuade them to take a specific action conservatively. 

4. Analysing peak hours

Peak hours are when digital signage receives the most views and customer engagement. This data allows your business to better conduct promotions by aligning them with when your audience is most receptive.

Digital signage analytics helps you allocate resources and enhance the overall customer experience. You display more targeted messages that are likely to convert.

Knowing when your business is booming makes it easier for you to prepare accordingly for significant events and busy days.

5. Measuring footfall traffic

Footfall tracking involves your digital signage system counting the number of people visiting your business. It uses modern cameras with sensors to collect data and compare it to conversions.

Footfall tracking helps brick-and-mortar store owners find ways to measure marketing impacts in an offline world. They deploy online campaigns to draw customers and use footfall analytics to determine their effectiveness.

Businesses use footfall traffic to develop strategies and make informed decisions. 

For example, if you discover that customers are spending minimal time in your store, find ways to keep them there longer, making them purchase more products.

Footfall tracking also enables businesses to maintain safety in areas that may be otherwise crowded. 

If, for instance, you have products that are in great demand, you can move them to a section where there’s less congestion and improve the overall customer experience.

See also: Increasing Foot Traffic: How Digital Signage Draws More Customers.

6. Helping develop cost reduction strategies

Some digital signage systems comprise content management systems (CMS) that collect and display real-time data. For example, if you need to tweak an ad slightly, you don’t have to hire someone to work on another ad.

Instead, you can access your system and delete or add what you need. This strategy is cost-saving and helps increase your business’s ROI.

You may also like: Maximising ROI with Self-Managed Digital Signage: A Comprehensive Guide.

7. Providing insight into what customers actually want to see

Most business owners assume what their customers want to see, which may lead to ineffective digital signage. Using digital signage analytics to determine what clients are more interested in may prove surprisingly beneficial.

Your buyers' dwell time is ideal for determining what attracts your customers. Start by experimenting with various types of content to see which garners better results.

Providing consumers with what they need through digital signage will have you looking for more screens since one won’t be enough. Digital signage analytics make it much easier to identify gaps in your marketing campaigns.

8. Promoting operational efficiency

Integrating digital signage systems with your internal dashboards lets you display multiple KPIs during staff meetings. You can display monthly sales data that highlights areas that require improvement and which strategies have been successful.

Digital signage analytics also shows you who is using your screens and who is not. For example, if you have a touch screen that customers can use to find different areas of your store, you can determine which areas are not easily visible.

This way, you prepare your staff to better help customers by becoming more agile and knowing when to offer assistance.

9. Real-time feedback on campaigns

Indicators such as the time a customer spends at a screen and their body language are available in some digital signage systems instantly. Such analytics help you make data-driven decisions and develop effective messages.

You can also make instant changes to your digital signage if you notice any errors.

Takeaway: Boost the success of your ad campaigns with digital signage analytics

Digital signage analytics is sometimes overlooked, while it is one of the most critical ways of developing campaign strategies. Like most people, I am a big fan of looking at screen displays in hotels, schools, and stores.

Businesses can deploy reliable digital signage solutions that help them gain valuable insights to help boost customer engagement and brand recognition. 

An ideal system offers scheduling capabilities, reliable data collection, and other essential features.

However, obtaining such technology that guarantees a reliable data collection process will require a substantial financial investment to acquire specialised equipment capable of collecting various data types.

Our software is yet to incorporate data collection and visualisation, but we hope this article explains the endless possibilities of digital signage. 

At the moment, Luna Screens focuses on helping businesses create and schedule content for displays. 

Our system is easy to use with no technical skills required. Register today to get started.