Cycles in traffic in malls ? Puzzled am I

I"m a newb mall landlord, so be gentle ok ? Not a newb to the game though. Anyway, I've noticed in my brief tenure as a mall landlord/owner that the daily traffic stats can vary wildly and for no apparent reason. I know some of the typical reasons, like vacations or right after Christmas I'm sure it sucks. Are there any other typical explanations for this ? Thanks for your time and patience.
Steve

Howdy Steve, I had planned on trying to break down traffic calculations as part of my research for the SLCC. Since I didn't end up attending here's some quick data for you to check out. I'll try to get back with some notes shortly...

Here is the other half of the weekly capture:

I don't know your biz at all.

Sorry Steve, I was in the middle of things and just leaving some data to come back to.

My location is no longer there. It wasn't a business, it was run at a loss to study traffic and interact with residents to work on my "user retention" articles.

The first thing to notice is the traffic variations of the most popular places. One can assume small changes due to inconsistent patronage, but the wider fluxuations indicate more down-time in my opinion (i.e. sim crashes, updates/patches, etc.)

My sandbox was the only mature popular place to not feature sex, casinos or both. I had four moneyballs spread around 1/2 a sim that paid out L$2-L$5 every ten minutes as well as four dance pads that paid out L$5/ten minutes. The moneyballs picked people at random and filtered for last winner and AFK. The pads filtered for AFK. This mainland sim was restricted to 30 avatars maximum for this time period though I believe is was updated to a newer server because at thetime of sale I had 40 avatars there. My traffic was definately impacted by its location on the Popular Places list, the use of classifieds (I ran two but since my wording didn't include sex or casinos, there were variations on click-through) and down time. Griefers would crash the sim on occasion taking it some time to re-populate. I never ran events.

For your case I would look at other malls through Find and check their keywords. How mny of your shop owners run their own classifieds? Do you run events? Do you pay staff to stand around to help customers and aid traffic? Do you run any gaming to keep non-shopping green dots on the map?

Give me some more information and I'll try to help. But if you get a chance click the pictures, look up the locations from those Popular Places, and try to see what they are doing to get their traffic.

Just a personal obeservation from my own habits and reading the forums. There seem to be quite a few people who see traffic as a useless measure and likewise see the position on the classifieds as useless as well.

High priced ads and high traffic do not necessarily equated to higher sales. Many people have voiced the opinion (and I share it) that the relative reduction in lag by a lower traffic shopping area is far more enjoyable to the customer. A happy customer is a paying customer. If I can't move I can't shop its that simple.

High priced ads simply scream to me overpriced goods and I avoid the place like the plague. After all they have to pay for the add somehow.

Agree with Paul. My place has hardly ever seen any traffic figure over 80, but my sales are consistent. People who want what I sell, find me and come.

Traffic is however, to at least some use, i.e. we at least have another tab to assort the listings apart from alphabets, or who throws the more dollars. secondly, it has its use as a measure of checking the performance of your marketing strategy, and thats what I mainly use traffic numbers for; and over time I have learnt some correlation between decisions I made and the traffic numbers.

I m recently breaking up 100, and I can relate it to what I did, that is useful.

Conclusion: for sales, it has no value, but use it as a measure to check your marketing decisions.