New technologies in the mobile phone era are enabling the measurement of retail foot traffic that will ultimately change how retail promotions are evaluated and how retailers compete.

Data sourced from opted-in location-sharing mobile devices will likely become a major metric for brick-and-mortar campaign success — just as the number of unique monthly visitors is to e-commerce sites. Both sets of data (real world and digital) can be mined for determining what’s working and what isn’t as retailers compare their data to the competition.

The most recent holiday shopping season is a great example. Anonymized, historical location data from devices can show which retailers won the battle for foot traffic both for the all-important Black Friday shopping day and throughout the holiday season.

The holiday season is the retail industry’s make-or-break opportunity for a profitable year.  This year was no different, and the news was mostly positive.

The National Retail Federation reported that more than 174 million Americans shopped over Thanksgiving weekend (from Thanksgiving Day to Cyber Monday) — 51 million were in-store only, 64 million purchased both in-store and online, and 58 million were exclusively online shoppers.

The surge of people researching, evaluating and ultimately buying online or via mobile apps during the holiday season continued. Adobe Insights (via CNBC.com) reported that mobile devices accounted for 46.2% of digital revenue on Black Friday, an increase of 18.4% over 2016.

Despite these trends and headlines such as “Mobile wins Black Friday shopping,” the good news for brick-and-mortar retailers is that most Black Friday shopping is still taking place at physical store locations, with 77 million making a trip to purchase items vs. 66 million buying online, according to Adobe (via Multichannel Merchant).

Foot traffic trends that we at Reveal Mobile compiled from mobile location data at over 8 million U.S. locations found that these seven retail chains saw the most visits on Black Friday: Walmart, Target, The Home Depot, Lowe’s Home Improvement, Verizon Wireless, Sprint and Best Buy, commanding 35.8% of all retail foot traffic on Black Friday.