Dwell time is the time a person spends inside a defined zone. It is measured per visit to the zone and reported as an average, a median or a distribution, usually alongside the number of people who entered the zone at all. Dwell can be measured for a product display, a promotional bay, a fitting-room area, a service counter, the space in front of a digital screen, or the pavement outside a window.
Dwell separates attention from passing traffic. A fixture by the entrance has high footfall because everyone walks past it, but if the average dwell is two seconds then nobody stopped. A fixture at the back with a quarter of the traffic and a 40-second dwell is doing more work. The combination of zone footfall and dwell is what tells a merchandiser whether a location earns its space.
Dwell has a threshold problem. A person walking through a zone registers a short dwell that means nothing, so most systems set a minimum, often a few seconds, below which a visit to the zone is not counted as engagement. The threshold should be fixed and stated, so that comparisons between zones and over time are fair and consistent.
Dwell is also a leading indicator for queues and service. Rising dwell time at a service counter or a till area means people are waiting longer. Outside the store, dwell at the window measures whether a display stops people, which is the step before capture rate.
Glimpse measures dwell in polygonal zones drawn on existing CCTV views, with the threshold configured per zone, and reports zone footfall, average dwell and the number of dwell events above the threshold. Glimpse Sensors measure dwell at a frontage or display where no camera covers it.