Foot Traffic Is Down, Basket Size Is Up: What That Means for Your Local Marketing

Fiserv released its Small Business Index for July this week, and the number worth sitting with isn’t the headline growth figure. It’s what’s underneath it.

The data: more spent per visit, fewer visits

According to Fiserv’s July 2026 Small Business Index, sales increased 1.6% year over year — marking the second-strongest annual growth rate of 2026 — “as consumers spent more per visit while remaining selective in discretionary purchases.” On the surface, that reads as steady, modest growth. But the breakdown tells a more specific story: growth was driven entirely by higher average tickets, which rose 3.2% year over year, while transactions — foot traffic — actually decreased over the same period.

In plain terms: the same or a shrinking number of customers are walking through the door, but each one is spending more once they’re there. That’s not a crisis. It’s a shift in where the growth is actually coming from, and it has a direct implication for how you should be thinking about local marketing spend right now.

If your own sales feel flat-to-fine but your store never feels quite as busy as it used to, this national data suggests you’re not alone — and it points to a specific place to look for growth, rather than a vague sense that “marketing needs to do more.”

Why fewer people are walking in

Part of the answer is showing up in how people search. A recent breakdown of Google’s AI-driven search changes points out that under the new results format, more searches now end without a click “because the answer is on the results page” — an acceleration of what’s called zero-click search — and even when people do click through, “they may click later, after AI has helped them narrow options.” For a business that depends on people finding it, researching it, and then showing up, that research phase is getting quieter. People are doing more of their deciding before they ever land on a website, a map listing, or a phone number.

Google has been building tools to help businesses adapt from the other direction. Its Gemini-based features, covered by PYMNTS, let an owner connect their Google Business Profile so the assistant has “access to things such as customer reviews, customer questions and performance data,” meaning an owner can ask how the business performed that month and get answers pulled from search impressions, direction requests, call data, and engagement. That’s genuinely useful for understanding what’s happening. It doesn’t, on its own, put more people in your store.

The decision this actually creates

If discovery is shifting toward AI-mediated answers that don’t always end in a click, and foot traffic is softening as a result, you’ve got two different jobs competing for the same marketing budget:

Job one: get people to physically show up. This is anything that creates a reason to walk in on a specific day, or reminds someone nearby that you exist outside of a search result — yard signs for a promotion, door hangers in the surrounding blocks, a mailer tied to a date, event signage, a poster at a partner location. This work doesn’t depend on an algorithm surfacing you correctly. It reaches people directly.

Job two: make each visit worth more. This is the printed material that only works once someone is already inside — menu boards, product cards, point-of-sale signage, loyalty cards, upsell displays near the register. If the Fiserv numbers hold and average ticket keeps climbing while transactions stay flat or soft, this is the side of the business that’s already growing. The question is whether your in-store materials are doing anything to support that trend, or whether they’re an afterthought.

Most small businesses default to spending on job one — get people in the door — because it feels like the more urgent problem. But if the data is telling you that the people who do show up are already spending more, it’s worth asking honestly which side of that split your budget is actually solving for, and whether it matches where the growth is coming from.

What to actually do with this

You don’t need to overhaul anything today. A few honest questions are more useful than a reaction:

• Look at your own numbers, not just the national average. Is your foot traffic down, flat, or up? Is your average transaction size moving? Fiserv’s report is a national signal, not a diagnosis of your specific storefront.
• Audit what’s actually working inside your space right now. If someone walks in, is there anything printed that nudges them toward a bigger purchase, or are you relying entirely on staff to make that pitch out loud?
• Decide where a marginal dollar does more. If your traffic is genuinely soft, a mailer or yard sign campaign timed to a specific date might do more good than another round of in-store signage. If traffic is steady but tickets are flat, the reverse might be true.
• Don’t assume digital discovery is dead. The point isn’t that online search stopped mattering. It’s that fewer of those searches end in a click, which means businesses that also have a presence people encounter directly — in the neighborhood, at the counter, on the table — have a hedge that doesn’t depend on how an AI summary chooses to answer a question.

None of this requires guessing. It requires looking at your own foot traffic and ticket trends the way Fiserv just looked at the national ones, and matching your marketing spend to whichever side of that equation actually needs the help.

Photo by Steph Quernemoen on Unsplash.