Foot Traffic Study: How to Check a Retail Location Before You Sign the Lease
A plain-language guide to running a foot traffic study before you sign a retail lease: what to measure, what a Location Score means, and how to get a number a bank or partner will believe.
A retail lease is one of the largest bets a small business ever makes. Before you commit €50,000 to €500,000 in rent and fit-out, you deserve to know how many people actually walk past the door. A foot traffic study answers that question with evidence instead of a landlord's adjective. This guide walks entrepreneurs — and the brokers who advise them — through what to measure, what it should cost, and how to turn raw counts into a decision you can defend to a bank, a partner or yourself.
Every listing says "great location, high foot traffic." None of them show the number. This page is the hub for doing it properly: capturing footage, drawing counting lines, reading your Location Score, and — just as important — auditing any footfall claim before you trust it.
Key takeaways
- A foot traffic study measures real pass-by counts for one exact address, by hour, day and direction — not a whole block or a modelled estimate.
- The number is only useful if it shows its method, its sample size and its margin of error. A single round figure with no error bar is a red flag, not a result.
- You can run one with a phone and no hardware, for a fraction of the lease it de-risks.
- The Location Score turns those counts into a 0–100 verdict you can put on the negotiating table.
Why "great foot traffic" needs a foot traffic study, not a promise
The person telling you a location is busy is almost always the person who benefits from you believing it. Landlords, listing agents and outgoing tenants all have a reason to round up. That is not dishonesty so much as optimism — but optimism is not evidence, and your lease deposit does not care.
The stakes are asymmetric. If you overpay for rent on a street that is quieter than it looked on a Saturday afternoon viewing, you carry that mistake for the length of the lease. A study that costs less than a day's rent can tell you whether the address earns its price. For a tenant-side broker, arriving with a real count is the difference between "trust me" and "here is the proof" — and closed deals.
What a good foot traffic study actually measures
A credible study is more than a single big number. It captures:
- Volume by hour and day. A café lives or dies on morning and lunch peaks; a wine bar needs the evening. The daily total hides which. Look at the hours your business trades.
- Direction of flow. Which way do people move, and which side of the street carries the crowd? A door on the wrong side of a one-way pedestrian tide can lose half its potential.
- Weekday versus weekend shape. A street that is dead Monday to Thursday and heaving on Saturday is a very different business than one with steady weekday trade.
- A margin of error. Every count from a sample is an estimate. An honest study says so, with a confidence interval, instead of pretending to a precision it cannot have.
Our foot traffic counting methodology breaks down exactly how raw video becomes these numbers — detection, tracking, line-crossing and sampling — so nothing here is a black box.
The methods, compared
There is no single "right" way to count. There is a right way for a pre-lease decision. Here is how the options stack up.
Count it yourself with a clicker
The classic method: stand on the pavement with a tally counter and count everyone who crosses a line. It is genuinely useful, cheap in cash and expensive in time — a credible three-day study is a lot of hours on your feet, and human counters fade, double-count and skip the night. Budget roughly $120–200 per day of labour and a 10–20% error band from fatigue.
Buy panel data
Platforms like Placer.ai or MyTraffic model visits from mobile-phone panels. They are excellent for national chain benchmarks and trade-area trends, but a panel infers movement across a block from a sample of phones — it cannot see your exact doorway, and European panels are thin for privacy reasons. Seats start around $12,000 per year. We cover where these estimates go blind in panel data versus ground-truth counting.
Ask the landlord for evidence
Reasonable — if the evidence is verifiable. A one-page certificate with a QR code and a disclosed method is worth something; "we get thousands a day" is worth nothing. If a landlord or agent hands you a footfall figure, run it through our guide to auditing a footfall claim before it changes your offer.
Install a hardware counter
FootfallCam, V-Count and similar sensors are accurate — but they need to be mounted inside a unit you occupy. You cannot install one in a shop you have not leased yet, which rules them out for the exact moment the decision is made.
Count from video, with no hardware
Point any camera — a phone on a tripod, the building's CCTV, or a file you upload — at the storefront, and software counts every person who crosses your line. No install, no occupancy, and you can measure an address you are only considering. This is the approach StreetProof is built around, and the reason a foot traffic study no longer requires a person or a sensor on site.
From counts to a decision: the Location Score
Raw counts still leave you asking "is this good?" The Location Score answers that in one 0–100 number, built from four weighted parts: how the traffic ranks against a real city benchmark, how stable it is across days, how well its shape matches your trading hours, and how much of it is your target category. Where we do not have the data to compute a part honestly, we leave it blank and renormalise the rest rather than invent a neutral filler.
Learn to read it in reading your Location Score, and understand why a short clip only earns a preliminary score in how accurate video people counting is.
How to run your own study, step by step
- Capture representative footage. Cover your real trading hours across at least one weekday and one weekend. See how to count foot traffic with just your phone and when to pick a camera or an upload instead.
- Draw your counting line. Mark the exact stretch of pavement that matters — the door line, not the whole street. How to draw a counting line shows how to get a clean, honest count.
- Read the result. Interpret the hourly profile, the direction split and the Location Score, and check the confidence tier before you lean on any projection.
- Verify it. A defensible study can be checked by someone else. Ours ships a 60-second annotated overlay and a public QR-verified page — because a number a counterparty will believe is the entire point.
Privacy matters here too: we count silhouettes, not people, and process video in the EU. The details are in is video people counting GDPR compliant.
What it costs — and why that is the wrong anxiety
A foot traffic study is cheap relative to the decision it informs. StreetProof starts with a $49 Spot Check for a single busy stretch, then a full 7-day Location Study is $199–399. Set against a lease liability in the hundreds of thousands, that is a rounding error — and cheaper than a single day of a person with a clicker. When you are ready, start a $49 Spot Check and see your street's numbers before you decide.
Frequently asked questions
What is a foot traffic study? A foot traffic study is a structured measurement of how many people pass a specific location over time, broken down by hour, day and direction. A good one states its method, its sample and its margin of error so a third party can trust the number rather than take your word for it.
How much does a foot traffic study cost? It ranges from about $49 to tens of thousands. A person with a clicker costs roughly $120–200 per day of labour; panel-data subscriptions start around $12,000 per year. StreetProof runs video-based studies from $49 for a Spot Check to $199–399 for a full 7-day Location Study.
How many days of data do I need before signing a lease? Enough to cover the hours your business actually trades and to see a weekday and a weekend. A few minutes of footage is only a spot reading; a representative 7-day sample is what lets us project a defensible daily estimate with a confidence interval.
Will a bank or partner accept a foot traffic study? They are far more likely to accept a number that shows its work: disclosed method, a confidence interval instead of a single suspiciously round figure, and an independently verifiable report. That is exactly what a StreetProof Location Study is built to be.
Related reading
A step-by-step guide to counting foot traffic with just your phone: how to film a storefront, when to use a camera or upload instead, and how to turn the footage into a Location Score.
Learn how to draw a counting line that produces a clean, honest foot traffic count: where to place it, which directions to count, using exclude zones, and common mistakes to avoid.
A plain-language guide to reading your Location Score: what the 0–100 number means, the four parts it is built from, confidence tiers, and how sampling turns a few days of footage into a defensible estimate.
What 'accurate' really means in people counting: MAPE, confidence intervals, ground truth, and why mobile panel estimates go blind on your exact sidewalk. The honest accuracy explainer.
Is video people counting GDPR compliant? How anonymous, silhouette-based pedestrian counting is designed to respect privacy: no faces, data minimisation, EU processing and short retention — in plain language.
The StreetProof methodology handbook: how raw video becomes verified pedestrian counts — detection, tracking, line-crossing, deduplication, aggregation, sampling and extrapolation — with the honesty rules that govern every number.
Why an unverified footfall number is dangerous, how to audit a footfall claim before you sign a lease, and exactly what a defensible Location Score must contain. A checklist for entrepreneurs and brokers.