Google Shows A Store’s Busy Times By Crowdsourcing Your Store Visits

Google announced today on Google+ that Google Maps on your mobile device will now show you how busy throughout the day a specific retail store or business is. When you click on a business, it will show you by day and hour, how much foot traffic the business gets.

Here is an animated GIF of how it works:

Mike Blumenthal has FAQs on this that document some of my questions on how this works.

Google will actually crowdsource mobile users locations to determine the foot traffic in a specific store or business. This is similar to how Google Maps traffic works, but is now used to pinpoint traffic in a specific retail store or business. Google said, “the information is based on anonymized and aggregated visits to places from Google users who have opted-in to sharing location data.”

Also the feature currently doesn’t work on iOS devices, but currently works with Android devices and a number of browsers, including Safari and Chrome. I assume this will come to iOS shortly.

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