Areas & dwell
How product and service zones are mapped, and the dwell and occupancy metrics measured inside them.
How product and service zones are mapped, and the dwell and occupancy metrics measured inside them.
Glossary
- Area An Area is a configurable region of the store — a polygon drawn on the camera view at setup — that becomes its own unit of measurement for entries, dwell, occupancy and queueing.
- Average dwell Average Dwell is the average time a single visitor spends inside an area — Total Dwell divided by the number of people who entered. It tells you how engaging an area is per visit.
- Dwell time Dwell time is the time customers spend inside an area or the wider store — the umbrella metric for measuring engagement with a space.
- Entry rate Entry rate is the percentage of store visitors who step into a specific area — how well the area pulls customers in once they're already in the store.
- Occupancy Occupancy is the number of people inside an area at a given moment. It moves up when people enter, down when they leave — a live measure of how busy the area is right now.
- Queue length Queue metrics are essentially occupancy metrics that capture activity within defined service areas, most commonly the till or cash desk.
- Store dwell Store Dwell time is the average time a customer spends in the store.
- Total dwell Total Dwell is the sum of time spent inside an area across every visitor — the area's full engagement budget for the period.
Questions
- Do you count entries to till points / service desks? Yes. We also provide additional metrics here including queue sizes, in addition to segmenting staff and customer areas.
- How are areas mapped? Areas are mapped by drawing polygonal shapes on the camera view during setup. Each shape becomes a tracked area — departments, checkouts, fitting rooms, service desks — and is fine-tuned against ground-truth audits.
- How does the system determine that a customer is within a zone? Our algorithm determines a person's location by identifying the lowest visible point of their body.
- How should areas be named? We recommend using generic Taxonomy (e.g. 'Product 1') instead of specific product names.
- What is the smallest or largest area size we can have? Dependent on the camera view, the smallest area is normally around 30–40 cm.
- How can I check the areas for a store? You have two options:
- Does it count people who walk through an area? Aura Vision only counts a visit to an area when someone stays inside it for 5 seconds or longer. People walking straight through aren't counted.
- Is there a limit to the number of areas I can have? There's no hard limit on the number of areas you can configure. Most stores get the best signal from 5–15 well-chosen areas rather than dozens of small ones.
- Why is the Entry rate above 100% or 1.0X? Multiple entries by the same person into an area are counted.