Every aisle tells a story, if you know where to look...and if you know what questions to ask. Here, we offer a list of some of our personal favorite aisle insights that you should add to your category wishlist:
Traffic Heatmaps
Standard retail heatmaps visually represent the foot traffic across every section of the aisle floor. Typically, heatmaps use a gradient color scale from red (indicating high traffic areas) to blue (indicating low traffic areas). Remember, while the placement of shoppers' feet provides valuable insights, relying solely on this metric leaves the story incomplete. To capture the big picture, consider not only the areas that collected the most footprints, but also consider the story behind each footprint. At VideoMining, we like to present the story of an aisle performance through the lens of:
- Foot Traffic Heatmaps: What areas of the aisle received the most traction? What areas of the aisle saw fewer footsteps?
- Dwell Time Heatmaps: It’s one thing to quickly walk past something in the aisle on your way to where you’re going. It is quite another to stop and smell the roses, or search and actively browse a section. Look to dwell time heatmaps to contextualize the traffic patterns.
Some other questions you should ask when looking at traffic heatmaps:
- How does this pattern vary by season, time of day, week day versus weekend?
- How do the adjacent categories located in the aisle play off of each other?
- Which square feet of the aisle are holding their weight, and which are falling behind?
- Why does this heatmap show a favored traffic on a single side of the aisle? What are the cross-facing categories, and how do shoppers interact with the two?
Engagement Heatmaps
- Foot traffic tells part of the story, but the story is incomplete without a full context of engagement rates. Look to heatmaps that are scaled based on the areas where shoppers are stopping, glancing, and engaging with the products most often in the store.
- Also, remember that stores are not one-dimensional, therefore, neither should your insights be. Heatmaps should show a birds eye view of the aisle, but also offer a perspective on the highest areas of engagement on the shelf - from glance rates, to product engagement, etc.
Directional Flow Aisle Maps
- The full story of the aisle dynamics should be bookended by the start, and finish, of the aisle experience. It is helpful to see how various shopper groups and trip missions enter, and exit, the aisle.
- Keep in mind, the question should be more specific than simply if the majority of shoppers entered from the front or the back of the aisle. It is also extremely helpful to ask which quadrant of the store the shoppers entered, and exited from.
U-Turn Rates and Flow Maps
- When looking at a single aisle, rebounds and u-turns can tell several stories. If you’re looking specifically at the holistic aisle experience, a high u-turn rate, meaning the majority of shoppers turn around before making it to the other side of the aisle, could indicate that the aisle is not enticing shoppers to continue down the path. This could also indicate that shoppers of a particular category are very mission-focused, grabbing what they need from the aisle, and then moving on to the next item. In that case, consider looking at the remainder of the trip and the basket affinities most common for aisle u-turners.
Aisle Rebound Maps
- For those interested in researching the intuitive way shoppers expect to, and try to, shop a particular category, aisle rebound maps are an important element of your behavioral toolkit.
- Look closely at the behaviors of shoppers who enter the aisle and actively shop the category. Measure the rate of foot traffic to engaged shoppers, and consider the source of activity for each second spent in the aisle.
- The paces of shoppers up and down the aisle tell a valuable story about the category hierarchy and product organization that the shopper expected to see.
- Consider the stopping points, and the way the shopper responds to category anchors in the aisle. For example, if a shopper is actively shopping for baking ingredients, and suddenly find themselves in front of the spices, they have reached an intuitive anchor point that tells them they’ve likely overshot and need to turn around.
Final Thoughts and Considerations:
While these examples are meant to offer inspiration, it is worth noting that the possibilities are truly endless when it comes to building a cohesive and connected story of the aisle experience. Successfully building the story can help improve shelf productivity, ROI per shelf facing, and help brand and category teams diagnose why their product isn’t flying off the shelf as they had hoped. Perhaps most importantly, however, is the exercise in shopper empathy that this kind of research provides, which can empower category teams with the facts they need to build growth strategies that deliver.
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