As you prepare for the upcoming holiday shopping season, it's a question you won't want to leave unanswered.

Knowing your sales figures is simple, but understanding all the many stars that needed to align beforehand is a bit more involved. And yet, doing that math is the mandate for retailers today, hoping to drive sales and maximize the in-store experience.

Finding your true sales figure involves solving the total retail equation, one that starts with traffic and incorporates additional multipliers throughout the entire buyer journey. Make the right changes to any factor along the way, and you'll find a new solution for boosting sales.

The total retail equation exists to calculate one key metric: sales. It’s the bellwether against which all business decisions are made, so it’s important to get right.

Top-performing retailers understand that, in order to grow business sustainably, you need a more complete picture of your sales data than can be achieved with a one-dimensional digest of the dollars and cents. When you need to improve sales performance, you’ll want more data so you can approach the solution from multiple angles.

So what does the total retail equation consist of today?

“When you think about how you arrive at sales, it starts with traffic,” said Elizabeth Kenny, regional director, customer success at Sensormatic Solutions. “But then it’s taking your conversion rate, or your percentage of shoppers who are making a purchase, and multiplying it by your average transaction size (how much each of those shoppers are spending).”

Seasonality will play a role, so look at any results through the lens of the season to determine how permanent any perceived peaks or valleys may be. Regardless, improving any one of those levers, be it traffic, conversion rate, or average transaction size can have an impact on sales performance. As such, being accurate early on is the easiest way to ensure results throughout. The equation’s first factor, traffic, is the metric upon which all others are multiplied, so getting accurate traffic data from the right technology is essential to ensuring your efforts bear fruit.

The goal of any traffic-tracking technology is to paint an accurate portrait of foot traffic in your stores — but a simple counting solution won't be enough. The best people-counting solutions come with additional analytic capabilities that can extract insights to help you make more informed decisions that drive sales.

That's why you'll want to make sure you're operating with the highest counting accuracy available. For example, leading people counting solutions can boast up to 98% accuracy, so you always know precisely how many visitors enter and exit your space on a given day.

Inside the store, you’ll want additional cameras placed in strategic locations to get an accurate picture of movement patterns along with advanced capabilities that can make quick work of analyzing what they mean. Sophisticated people-counting technology will be able to help you identify your best opportunities for traffic, when sales occur and how your stores perform during these critical windows.

If you only have your own store's past traffic performance to compare new improvements to, you risk remaining a big fish in a small pond. Engaging traffic solutions that have access to market-wide data can provide you with a better idea of the competitive landscape. Sensormatic Solutions’ Market Intelligence capabilities, for instance, can give you a clear picture of how your store stacks up against competitors in your area. With year-on-year trend analysis and shopper visit data, you’ll have better benchmarks to understand store performance at the city, regional, or even country level.

A solution that can aggregate this information into a single source of truth will allow for more convenience and help you extract actionable insights with greater ease. Consider implementing an analytics suite that merges traffic trends from your stores with those of the broader market to generate instant comparative insights — so you can make strategic decisions and correct course faster should you need to.

With the right traffic-tracking technology, you'll have all the data and capabilities you'll need to begin connecting traffic to improved sales performance. However, there are still a few more steps you can take to ensure you're getting the most out of your traffic data.

1. Deploy Traffic Across All Stores

It’s not enough to just begin tracking foot traffic, though getting started is an important step. To truly get the most out of your traffic data, Kenny recommends widening your scope.

“Traffic is unique by every day, hour, location, and season. It’s really important to understand traffic down to the store level,” Kenny said. “If you’re a retailer that’s only measuring a sample set of stores to make business decisions, you’re likely limiting your sales growth.”

2. Utilize Traffic Across Multiple Departments

Traffic is key to driving sales, but understanding when and where your customers are most primed to buy can inform decision-making across all levels of your organization.

“You may start out just utilizing traffic data within your operations or store teams, but utilizing traffic in real estate, marketing effectiveness, and merchandise planning can really benefit your organization.”

3. Bring Data Down to the Field

Traffic data has use beyond just high-level decision-making. Sharing traffic data with store teams ensures everyone is on the same page about where and when they need to be to assist shoppers and drive the most sales.

“Empowering store teams to understand the value of traffic data and performance is going to build a culture of engaged teams and drive and improve retention within your organization,” Kenny noted.

Calculating your true sales boils down to some simple math involving a few key factors: traffic, conversion rate, and average total purchase, when combined and adjusted for seasonality, will tell you how well you’re doing along each step of the shopper journey.

Mastering traffic from the get-go can have a ripple effect throughout, helping you reinforce the preliminary conditions that later lead to sales. Consider utilizing a people-tracking solution with top-of-the-line accuracy and expanded analytic capabilities to extract the right insights, harness the most value, and inform meaningful solutions that maximize sales.