What Is Dwell Time and Why It Matters More Than Footfall

For years, one of the busiest streets in Montpellier was also one of the worst places to open a shop.

The street was Rue Maguelone, the corridor that runs from Place de la Comédie down to the Saint-Roch train station. Tens of thousands of people walked it every day, in and out of trains, in and out of the city centre. On paper, the foot traffic was extraordinary. In practice, almost nobody opened a successful store on it, and the few that tried struggled. Retailers who only checked the footfall number got the location completely wrong.

The reason was simple. Volume of people is not the same as volume of shoppers. Dwell time, the average amount of time visitors actually spend in a place, is what separates a busy corridor from a commercial address. And before you sign a lease anywhere, it is the metric that decides whether the rent will pay for itself.

This article walks through what dwell time is, why it predicts retail revenue better than raw footfall, and how to read it before committing to a location.

Footfall counts people. Dwell time counts intent.

Footfall measures the number of people passing through a location over a given period. Dwell time measures how long they stay there. The two metrics sound similar. They describe completely different things.

A train station entrance can log 80,000 daily passers-by. A high street with cafés, boutiques, and a couple of anchor stores might see 22,000. Looking only at footfall, the station wins by almost four to one. But the people in the station are running for the 7:42 to Lyon. The people on the high street are browsing, eating lunch, trying things on. One group has zero retail intent in the moment. The other group has nothing but. That is the entire game.

Dwell time exposes the difference. A typical transit corridor shows dwell times of two to five minutes per visitor. A genuine shopping street averages 25 to 45 minutes. A destination zone, the kind of address that draws people who came specifically to shop or eat or hang out, can run past an hour. Same city. Same general neighbourhood. Three completely different commercial profiles.

This is also what makes a flagship work. Flagships are not built on footfall alone. They sit on streets where people came to be there, not pass through there. The brands that get this right look at dwell time first and traffic volume second.

The Montpellier proof: why a high-traffic street had no shops

Place de la Comédie is one of the most-walked addresses in France. According to local commerce reporting, 80,000 people pass between Polygone and Comédie every Saturday afternoon. It connects the train station to the historic centre. Four tram lines feed into it. By any traditional retail metric, every storefront on or around the square should be gold.

It was not. Rue Maguelone, the street that runs from the square down to Gare Saint-Roch, logged enormous footfall but failed to attract or retain retail. The reason was structural. Rue Maguelone is the path of least resistance between the train and the city centre. People walked up it to get to the cafés on the square, the cinema, the shopping centres on either side. They walked back down it to catch their train. They did not stop. Retailers who looked at Rue Maguelone through a footfall-only lens saw a winner. The dwell time told a different story.

Montpellier Méditerranée Métropole, the public authority responsible for the city's commercial attractiveness, used MyTraffic to break the area down street by street. Laurine Rey, who runs commerce and crafts strategy for the metropolis, has described how the data lets the team objectivise the discussion around address-level commerciality. Once dwell patterns became visible, the underperformance of certain stretches stopped being a mystery and became a brief.

The metropolis reopened a historic building, the Grand Magasin Capoulié, and brought in Søstrene Grene as the anchor tenant. The result was a sharp, measurable shift in foot traffic on the surrounding street, with reported growth above 50%. The dwell time changed too, because Søstrene Grene gives people a reason to stop, not just to pass through.

For retailers, this is the lesson hiding in a public-sector case study. If a city government can pick the wrong street by looking only at footfall, so can you. The address that would have been read as a slam dunk on volume alone was the one quietly killing the businesses that opened there. Reading the location's full DNA, footfall plus dwell time plus visitor profile, is what made the difference.

How dwell time changes a location's commercial DNA

Once you start reading dwell time alongside footfall, three things become clear.

It separates transit from intent

Two streets with identical visitor counts can have completely different commercial value. The street where people stop is worth ten times the street where people pass through. Dwell time is the most reliable signal of which is which. American retailers have started leaning on this signal as the front line of site selection, because the cost of misreading a corridor is far higher now than it was five years ago.

It signals which retail categories fit

A high-velocity, low-dwell zone works for grab-and-go formats. Coffee, snacks, convenience. A medium-dwell zone, where people browse for 20 to 45 minutes, is where apparel and accessories thrive. A long-dwell zone, where visitors stay an hour or more, is where considered-purchase categories like furniture, electronics, and beauty perform. Putting the wrong format in the wrong dwell profile is one of the most common mistakes in retail expansion, and it is preventable.

It correlates with conversion and basket size

Time inside a store turns into time considering products, which turns into purchases. Research from people-counting analytics shows a clear pattern: a 1% increase in dwell time leads to roughly a 1.3% increase in sales. Lightspeed cites recent figures putting the lift at between 1.3% and 2% per 1% of dwell, with some retailers seeing 10% or more under the right conditions. Pre-opening, this translates directly: locations that hold visitors longer tend to convert them at higher rates once you are inside.

The category fit problem most retailers miss

There is no universal "good dwell time." There is only the right dwell time for what you sell.

A coffee chain that opens on a destination shopping street is paying premium rent for slow-moving foot traffic. A furniture showroom on a transit corridor is begging for an audience that does not exist there. The mismatch is invisible if you look only at footfall, because the volume of people passing the door looks healthy in both cases. The dwell time is what tells you whether those people are even capable of becoming customers.

The same logic applies even within categories. Choosing a coffee shop spot in Paris is not just about traffic volume; it is about which kind of traffic, at which time of day, with what dwell profile around the door. A Marais café and a République café look similar on a map and behave like different businesses.

A practical example: two Paris addresses, two different bets

Picture a mid-range sportswear brand picking its first Paris store. Two locations are on the table.

Location A is near Gare du Nord. Around 80,000 daily passers-by. Average dwell time in the immediate radius: about 4 minutes. Most of those people are catching trains, leaving offices, or walking quickly between transit nodes.

Location B is in the Marais. Around 22,000 daily visitors. Average dwell time: closer to 38 minutes. Visitors are eating, shopping, exploring boutiques, sitting on terraces.

A footfall-only read says Location A by a landslide. It is 3.6 times busier. The signage gets seen by far more eyeballs. The pricing reflects this, because the asking rent on a transit-heavy address tracks the visitor count.

A dwell-time read says the opposite. The Marais visitors are in shopping mode. They have time. They came to browse, and a sportswear brand is a perfectly natural detour for them. The Gare du Nord visitors have a train to catch. They will not walk in to try on a jacket. The footfall is real, but it converts at a fraction of the rate.

Done correctly, the analysis shows that the brand is paying more at Location A for an audience that cannot, in the moment, become customers. Location B is the better commercial bet despite having less than a third of the volume. The 22,000 daily Marais visitors are worth more than the 80,000 Gare du Nord crossers, because dwell time tells you what they are doing, not just that they exist.

This is the type of comparison every retailer should do before signing a lease, and it is the comparison no spreadsheet can do without proper location data.

How to read dwell time before signing a lease

If you are evaluating a location, dwell time should sit alongside footfall, demographics, and competitive density in your decision. Practically, that means asking five questions about any address.

1. What is the average dwell time on this street, by the metre? Streets are not uniform. Dwell can collapse over a 50-metre stretch where the street narrows, or where a bus stop sits. You want the dwell at your candidate door, not the dwell of the broader area.

2. How does it compare to the city baseline and to the closest competitive zone? A 22-minute dwell sounds healthy until you find out the equivalent street one tram stop away runs at 41. Benchmarking is what tells you whether you are looking at a good address or just a non-disastrous one.

3. Does dwell vary by hour, by day, by season? A street that averages 30 minutes might be 8 minutes on weekday mornings and 50 on Saturday afternoons. If your concept relies on weekday lunchtime traffic, the average lies to you. The hourly breakdown is what matters.

4. What is the dwell of visitors specifically inside your real catchment area? Strangers passing through the city behave differently from locals. If your concept depends on repeat visits from people who live within a kilometre, you want to know the dwell of those specific visitors, not the dwell of every device that pings the area.

5. What is the dwell time around your closest competitor's store? If their door has high dwell, the zone has shopper intent. If it has low dwell, even a strong brand is fighting the address. This single comparison can tell you whether you are entering a healthy retail zone or a deceptive one.

This is the kind of question retailers ask when they are looking for the best tool to analyze pedestrian foot traffic around a specific address. Footfall counters, mobile location panels, and people-counting hardware each get pieces of the picture. The picture only becomes useful when you can read footfall and dwell time together, broken down by hour, by zone, by visitor profile, all anchored to a real street address. That is what location intelligence platforms exist to do.

Stop guessing. Read the DNA of the address.

Footfall tells you how many people pass by. Dwell time tells you who they are in that moment. One number is the size of the audience. The other is whether the audience is in any state to walk into a store. Mistake one for the other, and you sign a lease on what looks like a slam dunk and find out, six months in, that the address is bleeding you.

The Rue Maguelone story is not a public-sector curiosity. It is a warning. The same gap between traffic and intent exists on hundreds of streets in every city you might expand into. The retailers who read both layers find the addresses where the rent makes sense. The retailers who only read footfall are buying lottery tickets at premium prices.

Reading the dwell time of a specific address used to require a custom study. It does not anymore. Gini by MyTraffic gives you footfall and dwell time, by the street, by the hour, by visitor profile, for any address in our coverage. Before you sign your next lease, see whether your shortlist actually holds shoppers, or just lets them through.