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Industries
Industry Solutions

Retail & QSR

Turn foot traffic into competitive advantage

23M+
U.S. POIs
~390M
Daily CPG Purchase Signals
Daily
Data Refresh
Global
POI Coverage

Overview

Understand shopper behavior, optimize store performance, and outmaneuver competitors with location intelligence and cross-channel measurement. GSDSI gives retailers and QSR brands the data to make confident decisions about site selection, marketing attribution, and customer acquisition.

GSDSI (Global Source Data Solutions Inc.) serves retail and QSR buyers with foot-traffic attribution, trade-area analytics, and competitive benchmarking grounded in device-level mobility data and 23M+ U.S. Points of Interest with precise polygon boundaries. The retail and quick-service restaurant landscape has fundamentally shifted. Consumers now research products online, compare prices on mobile devices, encounter CTV advertising at home, and ultimately purchase in-store, creating a fragmented journey that traditional analytics cannot track. GSDSI bridges this gap with privacy-safe location intelligence derived from device-level mobility data, foot traffic attribution that connects digital ad exposure to physical store visits, and competitive benchmarking powered by 23M+ U.S. Points of Interest with precise polygon boundaries. Retailers use our data to identify optimal expansion locations by analyzing actual visitor origins and trade area overlap rather than relying on simplistic radius-based models. QSR brands measure the real-world impact of CTV and mobile campaigns on restaurant visits, quantifying incremental foot traffic driven by each media channel. Category managers combine purchase data from our CPG Feed with location-derived visitation patterns to understand not just what consumers buy, but where they shop, how often they visit, and which competitive locations they also frequent.

Fast path (pilot)

If you’re evaluating this vertical, start with a matched sample and a success threshold that’s specific to your cohort and geography.

Pilot process →Evaluation checklists →

What to request

  • Schema + join keys (what you can actually connect to).
  • Refresh cadence + change control expectations.
  • Governance: exclusions, retention, deletion SLAs.
Developer hub (schemas & delivery) →

Provenance & compliance

If this use case touches sensitive categories or regulated outcomes, align on permitted uses and enforced exclusions before scaling volume.

Sourcing methodology →Privacy & compliance buying guide →

Retail foot traffic statistics (2025-2026)

These are the most recent published figures we could trace to the original source. Each row shows the month it describes and links to the page we read. Visit figures come from the publisher's own device-panel estimates, so compare them within a source rather than across sources.

Retail foot traffic and sales statistics by source
MeasureFigureAs ofSource
U.S. retail foot traffic, year over year per Colliers monthly series+2.0 percentJune 2026Colliers Retail Market Intelligence
U.S. retail sales, year over year+8.4%June 2026Colliers Retail Market Intelligence
Discount and dollar store visits, year over year per Colliers monthly series+9.2%June 2026Colliers Retail Market Intelligence
U.S. retail sales, year over year+5.3%August 2026Colliers Retail Market Intelligence
Clothing store visits, year over year per Colliers monthly series+3.6%August 2026Colliers Retail Market Intelligence
Discretionary retail visits, year over year+1.8%September 2026Placer.ai Retail and Dining Index
Essential retail visits, year over year+1.4%September 2026Placer.ai Retail and Dining Index
Mall visits, year over year (open-air / enclosed / outlet)+5.6% / +5.5% / +4.1%September 2026Placer.ai Mall Index
U.S. retail and food services sales (advance estimate), year over year$773.9 billion, up 6.0 percentAugust 2026U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Retail Trade
NRF forecast for 2026 U.S. retail sales growth+4.4%, to $5.6 trillionForecast issued March 2026National Retail Federation

Visits vs sales

In June 2026 Colliers reported retail sales up 8.4% year over year while retail foot traffic rose 2.0 percent (per its monthly series). Colliers attributes the sales figure to earlier Prime Day promotions, lingering tax refund spending and inflation, so the sales number is not a count of extra shoppers. Census Bureau data for August 2026 shows the same direction, with sales up 6.0 percent from a year earlier. Read visits as how many trips shoppers made and sales as how many dollars they spent. A brand can gain on one and lag on the other.

How foot traffic is measured

Four methods show up in published retail traffic numbers. Device-panel GPS counts visits from a sample of phones and scales the sample up. Door sensors and people counters count entries at one location. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth signals log nearby devices. Point-of-sale data counts transactions, which is a different thing from a visit. Placer.ai, for example, states on its index pages that it uses a panel of tens of millions of devices and machine learning to estimate visits.

GSDSI mobility data is device-level latitude and longitude signals collected through SDK-integrated mobile applications, Wi-Fi sources and consented data partners. Signals are quality filtered, then matched against our Points of Interest repository (23M+ U.S. POIs with polygon boundaries) to turn raw pings into visit events. See how accurate foot traffic data is and our sourcing methodology.

Look up a chain

Try the foot traffic coverage by chain, which lists location counts and typical uses for each brand, or open a chain page directly: Costco, Trader Joe's and Whole Foods. For site selection, read the retail site selection data stack.

Challenges We Solve

Measuring the real-world impact of digital and CTV advertising on store visits
Identifying optimal locations for new stores while avoiding cannibalization
Understanding cross-shopping behavior and competitive share of visits
Connecting online engagement to in-store purchase behavior

How GSDSI Helps

Foot Traffic Attribution

Link CTV, digital, and OOH ad exposure directly to store visits using deterministic device-level data.

Trade Area Analysis

Define true trade areas using actual visitor origins rather than simple radius-based models.

Competitive Benchmarking

Compare your locations' visitation against competitors with POI-level foot traffic data.

Customer Segmentation

Build high-fidelity shopper segments using purchase behavior, location patterns, and media exposure.

Recommended Data Products

CTV / Smart TV (ACR) Feed

Automatic Content Recognition signals from smart TVs for measurement and cross-channel attribution.

CPG Feed

Transaction-level purchase data across grocery, household, and personal care categories.

Euclidean Feed

Unified cross-channel dataset linking mobile, CTV, and CPG for closed-loop attribution.

Points of Interest (POI) & Geofencing

Global place intelligence with 23M+ U.S. POIs with coverage in 150+ countries: polygon boundaries, brand hierarchy, NAICS classification, and geofencing for foot traffic analytics and attribution.

Global Mobility/Location Data

Device-level GPS signals and aggregated mobility patterns, with a daily US and Canada feed plus country-specific coverage.

Related pages

Ready to get started?

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Frequently asked questions about Retail & QSR

How do retailers typically use GSDSI data?

For competitive foot-traffic share, audience activation against best-customer lookalikes, CRM enrichment with demographic and lifestyle attributes, retailer-media supplementary targeting, and category-level transaction benchmarking via the CPG feed. Most retailers buy a bundle: foot traffic + identity + transaction signals.

Can GSDSI activate to retailer-media networks?

Yes, to the major retailer-media networks where they accept third-party audience activation, via hashed-identifier handoff or clean-room delivery. Specific retailer-network compatibility is scoped per use case during onboarding.

Is in-store transaction data available?

Yes via the CPG feed: roughly 71.5M daily active users and ~390M purchase signals daily, with item-level detail where SKU is captured. Useful for cross-shop, basket-affinity, lapsed-buyer triggers, and category share-of-wallet analysis.

Can I benchmark my store performance against competitors?

Yes. Foot-traffic share-of-visit and transaction share-of-spend can be scoped to a competitor set, geography, and time window, with daily refresh for high-frequency monitoring. Output is a panel-rebased percentage view with confidence intervals, not raw counts.

How does GSDSI compare to Placer.ai or Numerator for retail?

Placer.ai specializes in foot-traffic dashboards; Numerator in receipt-panel transactions. GSDSI offers raw daily signal across foot traffic, transactions, identity, and ACR under one contract, typically for buyers who want to do their own modeling rather than consume packaged dashboards.

Is retail foot traffic up in 2026?

Modestly, by the figures we sourced. Colliers reported U.S. retail foot traffic up 2.0 percent in June 2026 (year over year, per its monthly series), while retail sales rose 8.4%. Placer.ai reported September 2026 visits up 1.8% for discretionary retail and 1.4% for essential retail, and its Mall Index showed open-air centers up 5.6%, enclosed malls up 5.5% and outlet centers up 4.1%. Each figure is a year-over-year change from that publisher's own panel, so compare within a source. The dated table on this page links every source.

Where can I get retail foot traffic data?

Public monthly summaries come from Colliers Retail Market Intelligence and the Placer.ai Anchor index articles, and sales context from the U.S. Census Bureau Monthly Retail Trade report and NRF. For chain-level coverage, see the free brand pages at /free-tools. To license device-level mobility and POI data for your own location set, request a sample from GSDSI.

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