We wrote in the past about the evolution of physical retail and how it is not being killed by the internet but rather re-invented.

 

Now brands and retailers can better understand customers’ habits,  predict store traffic and access valuable data such as age, gender, frequency in the area etc of customers passing through, thanks to the new Foursquare Analytics Dashboard now available to businesses of any size.

While Foursquare started as a social check-in app in has now grown into a database of check-ins at nearly 100 million public places.

The best example to use is when Foursquare predicted that Chipotle sales would fall 29% after it was hit with E.coli outbreak. The actual decline ended up being spot on 30%

The data is collected via Foursquare’s existing database of locations (which powers more than 100,000 apps, including Snapchat), as well as anonymized in-store-visit data collected from users of Swarm and Foursquare who have opted in to always-on location sharing. Foursquare then normalizes this data to make sure it accurately represents the U.S. population as a whole.