SAN FRANCISCO, CA--(Marketwired - Aug 7, 2014) - Euclid, the leader of in-store retail analytics, today releases its monthly retail benchmarks report to analyze shopper activity and behavior during the month of July. This month's report measured data from tens of millions of domestic shopping sessions to reveal that the second half of 2014 looks promising for retail, as expected. Similar to last month, shoppers made fewer trips to the store. However, greater consumer confidence and early back-to-school shopping contributed to significant outperformance in July duration. The sensational duration numbers signal that engaged shoppers were ready and willing to spend.

Euclid asserts that its metrics illustrate a positive outlook for industry revenues, and estimates sales growth in the following retail verticals of:

• 2% growth year-over-year in general merchandise, apparel, furniture and other (GAFO) retail sales
• 1% growth year-over-year in clothing and apparel sales
• 1% decline year-over-year in general merchandise sales

Here are some of Euclid's top findings in this month's report around shopper behavior metrics:

• Shopper traffic declined six percent compared to the same month last year, due to real wage pressure, favorable summer weather, and a shift towards big-ticket item purchases
• Storefront conversion was up one percent year-over-year, but declined from June due to an uptick in traffic outside of the store across shopping real estate
• Average duration increased eighteen percent from last year. A higher percentage of shoppers made back-to-school purchases than last year and were very intent to buy, leading to the longest average duration seen in the last two years
• Repeat visits decreased one percent year-over-year due to the same factors that affected traffic. The increasing influence of online retail continues to affect repeat visit behavior

The best shopping day of July was Sunday the 27th. Outperformance was experienced across all metrics on the 27th, with especially favorable numbers for duration, engagement, and bounce rate. On the other hand, Friday the 11th was the worst shopping day of the month. Low traffic coupled with poor engagement marked this day and likely led to sales underperformance.

To view the complete findings, download the full report on shopper activity for the month of July here: http://info.euclidanalytics.com/WC14-07USRB_Reg_RLP.html

About Euclid
Euclid provides answers and insights to brick and mortar retailers in the same way that web analytics services do for e-commerce. Euclid helps retailers quantify offline impact of marketing, optimize store performance, and understand customer behavior. As of July 2014 Euclid's network has grown to capture billions of measurements per day, analyzing hundreds of millions of potential shopping sessions per year across thousands of locations. Only anonymous, non-personal data is ever collected and only aggregated trend data is used for analysis.