Footfall Figures Don’t Always Tell The Full Story For Town Centres

Across Northern Ireland and the wider UK, town centre footfall figures are regularly published and discussed as a measure of economic activity. Cameras and sensors track how many people pass through key locations, and the results are often presented in reports, council briefings, and Business Improvement District (BID) meetings.

Many local authorities and BIDs review Springboard footfall data, produced by MRI Software, which compiles data from monitoring systems installed across town centres. These figures are commonly referenced during local council meetings and BID discussions as part of updates on town centre performance.

However, while footfall was once seen as a useful indicator, it now carries far less weight for retailers and hospitality businesses than metrics such as conversion rates and average spend.

Footfall simply measures movement. It does not measure economic activity.

Town centres have evolved significantly over the past decade. They are no longer spaces dominated purely by retail. Today they include gyms, community hubs, service-based businesses, offices, health services, and other facilities that attract people for reasons unrelated to shopping.

As a result, a person passing a footfall sensor may simply be walking through the town, attending an appointment, exercising, or meeting someone for coffee.

Evening dog walkers are counted. Runners passing through town are counted. People moving between services or appointments are counted.

The technology records movement, but it does not record spending.

Events can also play a major role in inflating these figures. When multiple events take place across different parts of a town on the same day, people naturally move between locations. Someone may attend a market, walk to another event, then head elsewhere later in the day.

Each time they pass a monitoring point, they are counted again.

This can lead to higher reported footfall figures, even though many of those counts may represent the same individuals moving around the town centre rather than new visitors arriving.

For this reason, many place managers increasingly engage directly with traders to understand how businesses are actually performing.

Key indicators such as whether trade is up or down compared with previous periods, alongside average spend per customer, provide a much clearer picture of local economic performance than footfall figures alone.

A town centre can report higher footfall while businesses still experience challenging trading conditions if the additional movement does not translate into spending.

Town centres today function as mixed-use environments where people visit for a wide range of reasons beyond retail.

Footfall data can still offer useful context, but it should be understood as only one part of the picture. For retailers and hospitality businesses, the true measure of performance remains much simpler.

Not how many people walk past the door.

But how many walk in and make a purchase?