CCTV camera heat mapping helps you identify patterns and trends, and understand customer behaviour and areas of interests.

Do you know how customers behave when they enter your store? Which products interest them the most and which promotions are they most attracted to? It’s easy to disregard these questions and prioritise tracking user behaviour on your website, yet it’s just as critical to monitor in-store patterns and trends. 

While invisible to the eye, most customers that visit your store leave a trail of data from the moment they enter. This type of data provides valuable insights that’s really worth analysing. Knowing as much as you can about your customers can help you understand how to better serve them and build the products and services they actually need.

This is where CCTV heat mapping comes in. Below, we’ll explain why it’s a great way to get a better understanding of your customer.

How CCTV camera heat maps works

Much like infrared cameras, heat mapping software integrated into CCTV cameras, captures people’s body heat as they move throughout a store and presents the data as a map containing “hot” and “cold” spots. Areas that show warm colours – red and pink, or orange – are the most popular areas visited by customers, while cool colours – blue and green – indicate spaces with little engagement or footfall.  

How CCTV camera heat maps can benefit your store 

Unless a new product has just been released or a particular store department is running a promotion, there’s no way to accurately map the shopper journey. Customers often move in a random, chaotic fashion which makes it difficult to monitor traffic patterns. In the past, you may have assigned certain staff to follow people around the store and manually record traffic patterns, but this process was often complex and time-consuming – not to mention very intrusive.

Heat maps tell the perfect visual story of what’s happening inside your store.

Let’s say you’ve just set up a product display in the fragrances department. On a given day, 1000 customers enter your store, of which 200 customers pass the display. The CCTV heatmap is able to tell you how many of that 200 stopped to check out the display, and how many of those interested picked up a bottle of perfume from the display.  

But, heat maps do so much more than that. They also determine how long shoppers spend in a specific area, the spots that attract the least amount of shoppers, and visualise the flow of foot traffic throughout your store.

With this data, you can place promotional stands along the most popular paths in the store, identify hotspots to increase your sales, play around with your store’s layout, and know the peak hours and days to have your staff on the floor.   

How to start using CCTV camera heat maps

Once your CCTV camera system installation is complete and the heat map software integrated, you simply select the time period over which you’d like to collect data from. This will generate a heat map as well as a report or graph showing activity over a specific day, week, or month. 

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CCTV camera heat mapping gives you the opportunity to keep tabs on all the ways shoppers are interacting with your business. Knowing which aspects of your business drive engagement, and which don’t, will make it easier to give customers a curated in-store experience.