How To Use The Foursquare Dashboard
As Foursquare is adopted as a marketing channel for more and more businesses, we are looking closer at how exactly companies are using the service. One of the newer features of Foursquare that any business will have access to is the Foursquare Dashboard, a collection of venue checkin analytics. In order to access the Foursquare dashboard, you have to first claim your venue.
How do you get access?
- Login to Foursquare with the account you want to manage your venue through — the contact information of this account will be public
- Go to the venue page on Foursquare that you want to claim
- Follow through the claim form by verifying the venue’s correct address and other details and then providing a phone number for Foursquare to connect to the venue
Foursquare has had some trouble scaling this process. We have heard from people that have waited for a month to hear back after submitting their claim and others that were granted access a couple days after submitting their claim. We got in touch with Foursquare to see where the venue claim process stands and they seem to almost have the process streamlined for all users. They are transitioning from processing all the requests manually
“Venue verification is of utmost importance to us,” said Tristan Walker, Business Development at Foursquare. As they work through the backlog, Walker said they are working their way from a 10-14 day response time to an immediate response time. “Today we’re 90% of the way there.”
Once your venue claim has been verified, you should have immediate access to the Foursquare dashboard. You can also label individual employee accounts as such so that they are excluded from mayor competitions.
What are the features?
The Foursquare Dashboard presents the following data
- Key Metrics (Overview of activity)
- Total check-ins
- Unique visitors
- Percentage of check-ins shared with Twitter
- Percentage of check-ins shared with Facebook
- Gender percentages of check-ins
- Top Visitors (3 listed)*
- Most Recent Checkins (12 listed)*
- All Checkins (detailed listing of all checkins)
- Time Breakdown (when users are checking in)
*Includes avatar, total checkins at venue, Twitter handle if available, and date/time of most recent checkin
Each of these data points can be viewed for these time periods
- Today
- Yesterday
- Last week
- Last 30 days
- Last 60 days
- Last 90 days
- All time
How do you manage the data?
While the Foursquare dashboard allows for certain long term tracking and graphs, it does not allow you to drill down into a specific date beyond the current and previous day. That may be coming in the future, but we have not heard any specifics on future additions to the dashboard.
It can be very useful to take the Foursquare dashboard data and create a historic record of daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or even yearly data points. For now, you are forced to do this manually by logging into Foursquare and moving the data to a spreadsheet or other tracking software of your choice.
If you are using Foursquare for any marketing effort, you should begin recording this data off of the Foursquare site so that you have firm historical data to refer to when judging the success of your Foursquare marketing activity.
Go Forth
There are certain questions you should be asking about your business before using any location based service. But if you have a brick and mortar business we recommend you at least claim your venue and see what data is there for to digest.
Thanks to AJ Bombers (@AJbombers) for allowing us screen grabs of their Foursquare Dashboard view.
