Each customer has a specific need when visiting stores, but, at the end of the day, there are some patterns that repeat. Heatmaps let us identify how the customer moves around the store and, consequently, which are the hotspots and cold areas.
The information can be shown in two different ways: either we get the traffic as a percentage (i.e. 21% of customers have visited the meat section) or as the dwell time (visitors have spent 16s on average at the meat section). Since thanks to heatmaps it is easier to identify popular areas throughout the store, category managers can make effective decisions in terms of product placement and category distribution.
The following picture represents the two basic types of heatmaps: traffic on the left, and dwell time on the right
There are many applications for heatmaps, including:
- Hotspots finding
- A/B testing of new layouts
- Location of the most popular areas of the layout
