St Albans Visitors are on the up!

St Albans city centre has a larger catchment area, a longer dwell time and a higher visitor frequency than the national average, show statistics released today by St Albans BID. Place Dashboard, a shopper behaviour analysis system, is a newly launched piece of software which provides actionable insights via a web-based dashboard. Place Dashboard uses a range of rich data sets and reports insights on movement, dwell and catchment of UK-based visits to St Albans city centre in line with data privacy guidelines and regulations, including GDPR. The evidence so far collected shows that the catchment for St Albans is over 22 miles (vs a national average catchment area of 13 miles). The average dwell time for visitors to St Albans city centre is 70 minutes, higher than Welwyn or Watford’s Intu centre. Visitors also visit on average 5 times per month, compared to, for example, just two times a month to London Colney or Watford’s of 4 times per month.

The data shows that despite national economic uncertainty, St Albans city centre enjoys good visitor numbers and is performing very well in comparison to other similar locations. BID Members will be able to access monthly PDF reports of visitor behaviour, catchment area and dwell time at stalbansbid.com. This information can be used by BID levy payers to help make informed decisions on marketing and which comparable cities to watch for ideas too!

Helen Burridge, BID Manager from St Albans BID says,

“We are delighted to be able to provide visitor insights for our business members in St Albans. The days of blindly measuring footfall without any knowledge of the reality behind the numbers is over. We look forward to sharing the results of the information gathering with BID levy payers. We hope this new project will form the basis of a new and improved understanding of the city and enable St Albans businesses to leverage the data to increase footfall 

Clive Hall from Place Dashboard says

“We’re pleased to be working with St Albans BID and their stakeholders to deliver this exciting initiative in St Albans. We look forward to sharing our data with St Albans to help better inform decision making, whilst also measuring the performance of the high street in a smarter way”.

Sarah Gillow, local business owner and Co-Chair of the BID Board says

“Our St Albans BID, which is funded by our city centre businesses, exists to help place shape our local town centre and our businesses wanted to know more about the people who spend their time here. The BID has launched this Project to meet that need and support St Albans businesses to become even better at providing what their customers want. Working together through the BID helps us all help to maintain St Albans as a wonderful place for residents and visitors alike.”

Reports can be downloaded from https://www.stalbansbid.com/visitor-behaviour/ and will be uploaded on a monthly basis, two months in arrears.