Location Analytics Questions: Filtering Non-Associated Employees and/or Neighboring Business Staff

[RussB]

I am new to the Meraki line of products and still learning about the Location Analytics as they relate to a the MR33 WAP we have - one per store location.

My main concern is that we have "noise" that I do not want included in location analytics. I am not sure if there is a way to "hide" it as opposed to just averaging it out over time.

For the record, our business (Shoe Retail) rarely has daily or weekly recurring customers/visitors that come in the store.

The noise I am referring to would be:

1. Employees who have wireless devices regularly in our stores but do not connect/associate with our APs
2. Employees/Staff of neighboring businesses (side-by-side or even below us in once case) that are at their own places of business most days. The argument could be made that these people are still potential customers. I am ok with that, but it would be nice to be able to filter them out.
   • I could probably reduce some of this noise by adjusting the radio/power settings for the AP, but this wouldn't be perfect and would likely sacrifice some performance on authorized, connected clients.

Ideally, I would want either:

• Instructions on how to filter out all clients (by activity/status) that are essentially daily, non-associated clients
• OR an explanation of how to exclude certain devices/MACs from analytics in a more manual fashion. This would be less dynamic, but my guess is that there may only be a dozen or two clients that are creating this noise at each location.

Thanks in advance if you made it this far. Any help or guidance (walk-thrus) would be very appreciated.

[PhilipDAth]

Alas I don't think you can eliminate these using the Meraki provided solution.

[RussB]

Thanks for the quick reply. Well why not 😉

It seems like it would be pretty handy for many of us. If I could filter a list of probing clients that show up almost every day with a certain signal strength, etc.... I could probably easily identify the "noise" and clean up my location analytics.

Oh well. I guess it will just come down to evaluating the values and differences over time. technical there should be similar noise all the time so there is still useful information.

[Hans · Accepted solution]

Hi Russ,

The location analytics reports can't be modified at this level. I have two recommendations:
- Use the request a wish box on your Meraki dashboard for this kind of request.
- If you need something very specific for your business in terms of location analytics reports we have an ecosystem of development partners that can have what you need for your business. Here https://create.meraki.io/  you can find all the necessary information.

Hope this helps.

[fernando-buil]

hi Russ,

Meraki location analysis only shows at dashboard a few information, and you cannot modify or even analyse an specific user; Meraki use a MAC hash algorithm so it's not possible to track a user on dashboard. Although it, using API the Meraki developers can extract all info and correlate.

In this way, we're using an external captive portal + mktg + location analysis for one of our customers based on Purplewifi. But it's licensed on AP number, so if you have a few APs the cost may be affordable, but if you have a lot the total cost is rising. If you have 5 or less AP you can try the free-mode.

regards,

[RussB]

Thank you, everyone.

fernando-bull (like the name and the movie). I am not sure how far we are going to take this, but where could I find out more info about that product. Is it just the Purple website you are referring to or is there a separate element?

[fernando-buil]

Hi Russ,

this captive portal license is ver good for: distributed installations with a lot of sites, and Meraki cloud AP infrastructure. It's focused to marketing and is created to capture all users data as they can. The insights derived from all data collected is awesome... if you show it to a mktg people, sure they'll want it.

i'm not a sales representative of Purple hahaha, but i think it's a good platform to capture user's data if this is the objective of your customer

please check https://purple.ai/

if you want to test the free license, a distributor near will contact you to activate it

regards,

[Limitless]

Russ, we also have a platform that excludes the zones and also identifies staff by dwell time and frequency of visit.

We show these on the dashboard as staff but exclude the data from heat maps and reporting as it skews the data.

Gary 

gary@limitlessinsight.com www.limitlessinsight.com

[mo_unify]

Hey Russ,

We use Purple as well for Location Analytics - although setting up is very particular.

You have the ability to set up exclusion zones so anyone detected in that region will not be counted in the reporting.

This works well for neighbouring sites, but ultimately depends on the accuracy of the location analytics, which takes a lot of fine tuning and correct positioning of the APs.

[Limitless]

Russ we tag users as staff that remove them from the data & heatmaps.  We can also add filter for any member there for more than four hours or a member there for more than 3 days a week.  We build this into our analytics dashboard that I am happy to showcase. Built for Retail business. Gary +447801858809 Meraki Partner & Developer @LimitlessInsight

[Limitless]

We provide a solution for Retail to remove this noise & also to link into Epos to see what they are buying along with recommendation & re marketing. If you want a chat gary@limitlessinsights.com