What is Dollars Per Visitor (DPV)?
Dollars Per Visitor (DPV) is a metric that measures the average dollars per visitor in a store. This kind of metric provides valuable insight in not only retail scenarios but also food and beverage retailers where conversion is a less important metric to measure.
How does Dollars Per Visitor (DPV) work?
This metric is calculated by dividing the total sales by the total number of visitors (footfall).
Setting your DPV target should take into account your weekly or daily average and sit one or two dollars higher, in order to keep your store teams hungry for improvement.
Best practice would be to calculate your DPV per hour for ultimate accuracy.
If you’ve made $100.00 in the last hour and the number of visitors to your store is 10, your DPV is $10.00. Ten dollars for every visitor to your store.
If you’ve made $700.00 for the day and you know your visitor count is sitting at 97, your DPV for the day would be $7.21 per visitor.
As you sell more, your DPV is driven up by your total sales amount.
Understanding Dollars Per Visitor
By itself, DPV can be a tricky metric to see the value in. Where it provides insight is when it’s coupled with conversion rate and ATV.
In essence understanding DPV for your store will allow you to monitor and measure whether or not your store is attracting visitors but if it is successful in converting these browsers into buyers. Where the store is not...DPV will shed light into what could be causing this.
The DPV metric should also guide strategic decisions such as store layout changes, staff training, and promotional activities with a "test and see" mentality.
By analyzing DPV, retailers can identify what strategies are increasing spending per visitor and adjust accordingly or pivot early to protect their profit margins.
Improving Dollars Per Visitor (DPV)
In its most basic sense, DPV is removing a blind spot for your store teams. When analyzing your data and you see DPV taking a sudden dive this can be motivated by two factors: Your conversion or your ATV.
If it’s a case of low conversion causing your DPV to drop, this means that the staff in your stores on the shop floor likely require some support and training in terms of their shop floor fundamental selling skills like greeting, meeting, closing and upselling!
If however, your conversion has remained steady, this means the most likely scenario is that your ATV or average transaction value has dropped and this is what is causing your DPV to come in a little lower.
A lower ATV can be fixed by doing one or both of the following:
Sell more items, increasing your IPT. In essence, increasing the number of items in your customers baskets.
Selling more expensive items. This usually requires either brilliant upselling skills or an increased price point on items in your store.
Selling more items and improving the health of your customers basket size is sometimes as simple as “Do you want to throw in a pair of socks with your shoes?”.
By focusing on improving DPV, retailers can unlock the secret to achieving greater sales success, enhancing customer satisfaction through 10/10 customer service in a way that is measured, monitored, managed and ultimately drives up profitability for your brand and business.
