Trade Show Booth Traffic: Data from 103 Checkpoints at PSCS 2026

Exhibitors at a trade fair all buy the same thing: a stand, and the hope that people walk up to it. Foot traffic decides whether the fair was worth the money, and most of it concentrates along the main aisles.

At the Portugal Smart Cities Summit 2026 (FIL Pavilhão 3, Lisbon, May 12 to 14) we ran Treasure Hunt across the whole floor. 103 checkpoints covered the floor: exhibitor stands, the stages, and the common zones. 351 visitors played over the three days. Here is what the data shows.

The Setup

Each participating stand had an NFC tag or QR code registered as a checkpoint. Visitors scanned with their phone browser, earned FIL tokens per find, and could spend them at a merch store stocked with 47 different items. No app download, and every transaction fee was covered by the game, so playing cost visitors nothing.

The Numbers

• 351 players across three days
• 8,123 treasures found, an average of 23 per player
• 103 checkpoints across stands, stages, and common zones
• 91.2% of players claimed a reward
• 717 merch purchases from the 47-item store
• 159,000 FIL tokens distributed on-chain
• 58 social shares claimed in-game, 29 of them on LinkedIn

What Booth Traffic Looked Like

The busiest checkpoint logged 245 unique visitors, which is 69.8% of everyone who played. That one was our own stand, where most players onboarded, so treat it as the ceiling rather than a typical result. The more useful signal is the middle of the table: the six tags in the stages zone alone pulled 275 finds from 178 unique players, and the single most-found stage tag was scanned 94 times.

Engagement was also broad rather than concentrated. The distribution of finds across players had a Gini coefficient of 0.39, meaning finds were spread across the player base rather than dominated by a few completionists.

Most Visitors Come for One Day

278 players played on a single day, 35 came for two days, and only 7 played all three. That matches how people actually attend trade fairs, and it has a design consequence: the hunt has to be completable, and worth completing, within one visit. Multi-day streak mechanics that work at a conference do little at a fair.

Timing matters too. On day one, activity peaked at 11 AM with 408 scans in one hour, and again at 3 PM with 402. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon are when the floor is full, and when a sponsor activation gets the most out of a checkpoint.

The Merch Store as a Draw

717 purchases over three days made the store one of the busiest spots in the game. Sponsored items work as their own checkpoint: the Lisboa Inteligente wireless charger sold out its 65 units by the final afternoon. A physical reward that people want gives the tokens a concrete value, and gives players a reason to keep scanning.

What This Means for Exhibitors

A checkpoint at a stand does one simple thing: it gives visitors a reason to walk there that they did not have before. The exhibitor gets a number at the end, unique visitors and when they came, instead of an estimate. At PSCS 2026 that number was auditable, since every find was recorded on-chain.

The full interactive report, with per-stand tables, zone breakdowns and hour-by-hour charts, is public: see the PSCS 2026 report. If you are weighing this for your own fair, the trade show booth traffic page covers how a deployment works from the organizer side.