This is a very interesting article on how to use Universal Analytics to perform some tracking in the physical world. This means we could track the physical world just like what we are doing in cyberspace, as long as the physical world activities could trigger and emit electronic signals. It could be very practical, interesting, and scary to track down an individual, as there are more and more wearable devices equipped with different types of sensors on the market. Those devices work like “cookies” to anonymously track individuals or even named individuals. This is a very important issue, but not to be discussed here and now in this post. Here we just talk about the potential capability.
The example of door open/close tracking is only tracking the physical world, this would be reapplied to many other situations or locations, such as shopping malls where some infrared trapping devices measure how many people pass doorways or go up escalators, or bus company to track how many passengers on and off on each stop. However, the physical world tracking can go further when combined with the existing tracking in the electronic world.
One of the most obvious uses is the retail scenario, with the deployment of iBeacon-like technology, online and offline traffic could be both measured, combined, and analysed. We may not be able to measure the physical shop traffic in detail as an online store where we could track what product had been viewed by a specific visitor, how long time he/she spent on each page, and much more via tracking code customisation. We could probably only be able to track how long time a specific visitor spent in the physical store, which area/zone the visitor had visited and perhaps even which aisle and shelf. But not, yet, to track which exact product had been picked up.
Even without the iBeacon-like technology to measure as much detail as the aisle and shelf, some simple infrared devices or face recognition from CCTV recordings could also provide rough customer traffic around different areas in the store.
Inevitably, the former will be the actual situation and extending whatever we currently doing about multi-channel sales and commerce on the Internet to include the physical world. It is not only about joining online and offline traffic but also promoting from both online and offline channels such as showing the discount message on the electronic billboard that suits most people just passing by (testing and targeting in the real world) and sending notifications to mobile devices via iBeacon.
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