Are you looking to optimise your retail space or event layout? A retail heatmap could be the game-changing solution you need. By understanding footfall analytics, you can make informed decisions about your space utilisation and product placement strategies.

Let’s get into the nitty-gritty of how they could work for you!

How Do Retail Heatmaps Work?


A retail heatmap is a visual representation of customer movement and engagement within your space. 

Using advanced event tracking technology, these systems monitor customer flow and create colour-coded maps showing areas of high and low activity. The warmer colours typically indicate areas with higher footfall or engagement, whilst cooler colours represent less frequented spaces.

I’m sure you can already sense how useful knowing the most used and underused spots within your space could be. Let’s dive deeper.

6 Benefits of Using Retail Heatmap Technology

The potential benefits of understanding accurately how customers interact with your space can be enormous. We’ll explain how it can affect your decision-making and prompt some big, positive changes.

Optimise Product Placement and Store Layout

By understanding which areas naturally attract the most attention, you can strategically position your most high-margin products for maximum exposure. 

Retail heatmap data helps you identify your store’s ‘hot zones’ and ‘cold zones’, enabling you to adjust product placement, create better visual merchandising layout strategies and even banish ‘dead zones’ by redesigning footfall flow.

Monitor Customer Behaviour in Real-Time

Modern retail heatmap systems provide real-time monitoring capabilities, allowing you to:

  • Track customer dwell time in specific areas.
  • Identify bottlenecks and congestion points.
  • Analyse customer engagement patterns.
  • Make immediate adjustments to staffing levels based on activity.

This can be especially helpful during any live events or promotional activity if you’re concerned about venue capacity.

Enhance Your Customer Experience

When you have a window into how customers move around your space, you effectively have a secret weapon to creating more intuitive and enjoyable shopping experiences. This could take several forms using the data from retail heatmaps, including:

  • Designing obstacle-free customer journeys.
  • Placing popular items strategically to prevent congestion.
  • Creating effective evacuation routes based on typical traffic patterns.

All of this can serve to make your shopping experience that much more enjoyable, cutting out any friction.

Data-Driven Decision Making

Data driven insights allow you to understand how your operation is running and validate any changes with data, rather than speculation. That means you’re able to adopt the same principle of making changes based on analysis as any other business. 

In practice, this could be looking at customer flow patterns to ensure your staff are properly positioned or even looking at historical data to help with your seasonal planning. The sky is the limit. 

Integration with Existing Systems

Modern retail heatmap solutions often work seamlessly alongside your existing CCTV systems, adding powerful analytics capabilities on top of your security and tech stack without disrupting your current operations. 

In an ideal world all of the data will be accessible through one central dashboard, making it simple to monitor multiple locations at once. 

Measuring ROI Through Analytics

Every implementation must demonstrate clear return on investment (ROI) for your retail space. for your retail space. 

Unlike eCommerce, where regular product performance analysis is standard, it’s more difficult to do so in store. Stock reconciliation often comes with a delay and doesn’t immediately ring alarm bells about why a drop in sales is happening.

For example: If a typically popular product isn’t selling, sales data alone won’t reveal why, however, a retail heatmap might reveal that it’s placed in a ‘cold spot’ where customers aren’t browsing. If it’s a high profit margin product you’ll be able to move it in a ‘hot spot’ to encourage sales.

Where Else Can Retail Heatmaps Help?

While retail spaces like shops, stores and pop-ups are the natural use case for retail heatmaps, there are some other interesting applications. 

Shopping Centres: Clear insights into which units are performing the best and which aren’t proving their worth can be invaluable as well as helping to perfect customer flow.

Exhibition Spaces: These kind of people tracking tech can be ideal for trade shows and exhibitions where you’re neck to neck with competitors and need to understand what gives you an edge

Car Showrooms: Get an accurate picture of how customers engage with vehicle displays and optimise the positioning of your highest-value models.

Large-Format Stores: With competitive profit margins, every product placement needs to pay into a strategy. Manage vast retail spaces efficiently by understanding how customers navigate your aisles and departments.

Get More from Your Retail Space

Capture retail heatmaps, count the number of visitors and even find out what routes your customers take. All of this is possible with Exposure Analytics’ suite of sensor-based tracking technology. 

Let’s explore the range and what they could do for your retail space.

EX Sensor

Using Wi-Fi signals from visitors’ devices, the EX Sensor creates detailed retail heatmaps of your space. It tracks vital metrics like total visitors, engagement rates, and dwell times. 

With built-in 4G connectivity, it’s equally effective in permanent stores or temporary retail installations. Want to know if your new layout is working? The EX Sensor can tell you if customers are returning and engaging more.

Apex Monitor

Apex Monitor provides accurate people counting at your entry and exit points. It’s perfect for understanding occupancy levels and measuring conversion rates at key areas. 

As it’s fully GDPR-compliant, you can track footfall confidently in order to make smarter decisions about staffing and space usage.

People Coordinates

When you need the finest detail in customer behaviour analysis, People Coordinates delivers. It tracks precise customer journeys throughout your space in real time, helping you understand exactly how people interact with your retail environment. This insight is invaluable for perfecting product placement and eliminating bottlenecks.

Ready to optimise your retail space? Contact us today to discuss which combination of our sensor solutions would work best for your needs.