Heatmaps provide a wealth of data to help retailers optimize floor space, deliver a better customer experience and ultimately increase sales. Meanwhile, new developments in the technology make heatmaps even smarter and more intelligent.
Heatmaps matter greatly in retail. They provide a wealth of business intelligence data to help retailers optimize floor space, deliver a better customer experience and ultimately increase sales. Meanwhile, new developments in the technology make heatmaps even smarter and more intelligent.
Heatmaps work by way of collecting data from different types of sensors, for example security cameras and people counters. The data can be processed either at the edge or in the cloud. Typically in a heatmap, warm colors such as red and orange demote high activity levels, and cool colors such as blue and green denote low activity levels. Heatmaps address various challenges facing retailers, who constantly struggle to get insights into how customers move about in the store or interact with products.
“Heatmapping reveals where customer attention is concentrated within a store and how that attention changes over time. They highlight high-traffic areas, zones where customers slow down or dwell, and spaces that are consistently underutilized. These insights allow retailers to make practical adjustments, such as relocating key products to higher-engagement areas, redesigning low-performing zones, or adjusting staff presence where customer interaction is most likely. When reviewed over time, heatmapping also helps retailers evaluate whether layout changes or promotions are improving engagement or simply redistributing traffic,” said Angel Cai, Marketing Manager at Milesight.
Below we take a closer look at what retail heatmaps measure and why are they important.
Foot traffic
Foot traffic heatmaps show where customers move about most frequently. For example, if a store sees red near the entrance but blue in the back, the storeowner can act accordingly by moving popular items deeper into the store. They can also improve signage or lighting in low-traffic areas. This provides various benefits for the retailer, who can improve sales per square foot, engage in data-driven merchandising and reduce guesswork in store design.
Flow patterns
In addition to foot traffic, heatmaps can also provide insights on customers’ flow patterns – where customers are coming from heading into each zone, and where they are going next. The retailer can then merchandize accordingly.
“Maybe you have created five or six zones, like kids’ zone, women's zone and men's zone. And the heatmap can give you data on what is the incoming traffic percentage from each zone – for example if a person is coming to the men's zone, where they are coming from, and if a person is leaving the zone, where they are going,” said V-Count. “So if the store sees that most of the people who are coming to the men's zone are from maybe the kids’ section, in the pathway they might put some products which might influence the kids to buy, maybe some toys or something,” said Pritam Dey, Sales Manager for Middle East and APAC at V-Count.
Dwell time
Dwell time is the total time a customer spends in a defined zone. For example, if a shopper stands in front of a shelf for 45 seconds, that area gets 45 seconds of dwell time added to it. In retail, dwell time is an important measurement, and heatmaps can provide great insights in this regard.
“Dwell time is important for a very simple reason. You need to understand what is the amount of time that people are spending in certain sections,” Dey said. “So, if I'm an owner of a retail brand, and I have put some goods in a particular section, I need to figure out if people are getting interested in those products. I need to understand if in that particular section, where I have introduced my new product, people are spending a lot of time or not. If they are not spending much time, that means this is not something that has any interest to people visiting that zone. So I may have to adjust merchandising accordingly.”
Semantic heatmapping and other new developments
Heatmaps are nothing new in retail. But they keep evolving. Nowadays, heatmaps are seeing new developments that make them smarter and more intelligent.
One example is semantic heatmapping. Working in conjunction with AI cameras or other advanced solutions, semantic heatmaps add semantics, or context and labels, to data gathered. With semantic heatmaps, retailers can know not just where the activity is, but also who (customer or staff) is performing the activity and what’s actually being done (simply browsing a product or picking it up and buying it).
“Heatmapping is evolving from simple density visualization into a more context-aware analytical tool. One key development is semantic heatmapping, where AI adds behavioral context to the data. This allows retailers to distinguish how space is used – for example, pass-through traffic versus dwell or queue behavior,” Cai said.
Cai also cites other new developments in heatmapping.
“Another advancement is improved analytical precision. Modern heatmapping is less affected by environmental factors like lighting changes or background motion, resulting in more stable and reliable insights in real-world retail environments,” she said. “Heatmapping is also becoming more operationally connected, allowing data to be reviewed over time, compared across locations, or correlated with layout changes and business performance. Together, these developments make heatmapping more actionable, shifting it from visualization to decision-support intelligence.”
All in all, heatmaps continue to see innovation and can now give users much more information than just assigning red to a hotspot and blue to a cold spot.
“The evolution of heat mapping goes beyond ‘coloring areas’ with colors. The trend is to make it more useful and actionable: analysis by periods and comparisons (by campaigns, days, time slots), greater precision in permanence and routes, and contextual enrichment when correlated with operational or security events. At the same time, AI-based analytics allows us to move from density maps to behavioral interpretations, so that heat mapping is not just visualization, but real support for deciding what to change in the store and how to prioritize actions. In short, it is not the graph that is ‘smart,’ but the ability to convert it into operational decisions,” said Tamer Mohannad, Regional Sales Manager for Middle East and Africa at SCATI.
Product Adopted:Retail