Working With Zones

Introduction

Zones are virtual areas that is drawn on a floor map to analyze visitor footfall & traffic trends, measuring event and campaign performances in your venue, and compare with other areas for benchmarking.

IPERA allows to draw zones in different shapes on floor plan in different shapes.

Best Practices for Drawing Zones

IPERA utilizes Wi-Fi enabled guest devices, BLE Beacon Wearables and IOT sensors for zone analytics. Depending on use cases, the following best practices help to understand how to draw zones. This article considers Wi-Fi based location analytics.

IPERA utilizes compatible Wi-Fi vendors to provide location analytics for venues such as malls, airports, hospitals, hotels, and smart cities. Any Wi-Fi enabled device carried out by a guest/visitor is captured with the approximate location of the device. Every 30 seconds to 60 seconds Wi-Fi Access Points send location of guests and visitors mobile device location information to IPERA. This information is then reflected on heatmaps on floor plans.

It is important to note that location accuracy will not be precise. In other words, Wi-Fi systems are not able to detect the exact location in 1-2 meters of accuracy. If a Wi-Fi infrastructure is designed based on the Location Analytics principles, 8-12 meters of accuracy is usually achieved. If Wi-Fi infrastructure is designed based on Wi-Fi coverage principle only, then accuracy will suffer even more. That is why the zones should be wider/larger to provide meaningful analytics.

Wi-Fi based Zone settings considerations:

1. Wider/larger zones are better than smaller zones due to low precision and accuracy.

2. Even if all stores in a shopping mall have Wi-Fi coverage, it is not practical to draw all stores as zones. Instead, you should consider sections with a name that can be remembered such as a legend brand (e.g.: Nike-front, Kids entertainment, Food court, Fashion, Dining, Tim Hortons front, etc.).

3. Larger rooms or stores can be considered as a separate zone if Wi-Fi coverage is available within those areas (e.g.: H&M, Zara, The Home Depot, M&S, Kidzania).

5. Entrances and exit areas should be drawn to understand visitors' journey from their entry/exit points.

6. Optionally each zone can have a tag name, such as corridor, entrance, and instore. Those tags may help for comparison among similar point of interest.

The following are some examples of zone comparison reports that can be produced.

To manage zones view the report, select Settings > Locations.

To see more, click Locations.

Select any floor and then you may click on "Edit" button to edit zones or create new ones.

This is a sample mall floor plan. Following are considered:

1. All entrances are marked (e.g.: M&S Entrance, Cinema Entrance, etc.).

2. Considering The Home Depot has Wi-Fi coverage in the store, and it is a large store (more than 100 sqm, it is marked as a zone.

3. Considering Nike doesn't have any Wi-Fi coverage in the store, the Nike-front zone is marked in the pathways.

4. Smaller stores that are less than 100 sqm, if they don't have Wi-Fi coverage, 3-4 of them can be combined with a zone. A zone can be named with one of the legends or famous store names (e.g.: Forever 21 front, etc.).

Zone Drawing / Editing Tools