Digital/Omni: How Do I Use Basket Heatmaps?

 

The Basket Heatmaps tool is a visual heatmap representation designed to highlight which products, categories, promotions, and other elements have the highest potential to be bought together in any basket. This tool is often used to drive improvements across metrics like Average Order Value (AOV) and Units Per Transaction (UPT).

 

The Basket Heatmaps Tool consists of the following; 

• Category by Category: which categories are most frequently bought together, e.g., Women’s Dresses & Women’s Accessories.

• Product by Product: which products are most frequently bought together, e.g., a bikini bottom with a bikini top?

• Promo by Category: which categories are most frequently purchased within specific promotions. For example, Outerwear has more purchases at 20% off than Dresses.

• Brand by Brand: which brands are most frequently purchased together (if a multi-brand retailer), e.g., own brand with Nike.

 

How to Navigate to Basket Heatmaps

• Select Basket Analysis from the left-hand navigation panel. 
• Click Basket Heatmaps.
• Select the Basket Heatmaps of choice, e.g., Category by Category.

 

 

How to Use the Basket Heatmaps Report

 

For this example, we will select Category by Category; all other Heatmap reports will function similarly. 

Selecting this tool will take you to a heatmap visualization. By default, both the X and Y axes show Product Category 1>2 and are sorted descending by category with the highest orders first.

First, select the Metric you want the Heatmap report to represent. 

• Click the Metric dropdown. 
  
  

 

This dropdown includes three key metrics to choose from: 

• Overlapping Orders (Support): The number of orders that include Men's Accessories and the secondary category, e.g., Men's Shirts. 

• Overlapping Orders % (Confidence): The percentage of orders for Men's Accessories and the secondary category, e.g., Men's Shirts. 

• Likelihood to Purchase (Lift): The likelihood of the secondary category being purchased with Men’s Accessories compared to any other category.  A score of 1 or above indicates a positive likelihood to purchase, and below 1 indicates a negative likelihood.

• Example: Men's Shirts are 1.07x more likely to be purchased with men's Accessories than any other category.

The Basket Heatmaps represents the relationship between two categories by blue boxes; the darker the blue of the box, the stronger the relationship. 

Using the Overlapping Orders % (Confidence) Metric as an example, we can see that Men’s Accessories overlap in a higher percentage of orders with Men’s Shirts than Men’s Footwear.

 

 

 

• Click on any blue square for more detailed information on the numerical data behind these category relationships. 
  
  

How to Refine the Data in the Basket Heatmaps Report

 

You can refine the visual data shared in the Basket Heatmaps Report in two ways.

1. You can use the Blue Scale to select and view the categories with the strongest and weakest relationships. 
   
   

• Click the darkest blue square to see only the strongest relationships (see image below)
• Click the lightest blue square to see only the weakest relationships.
  
  

 

You can use the Minimum Overlapping Orders scale to add a rule showing the relationship between categories with a minimum number of overlapping orders. To set this rule, 

• • Use the sliding scale.
  • or type in a number in the text box to the left of the scale, e.g. 300.
    
    

 

 

How to Add /Amend Fields to the Basket Heatmaps Report

 

• Click the blue Configure button on the right-hand side of your Basket Heatmaps report.
  
  

 

You can opt to add or amend a field to either or both the Primary and Secondary grids, which are the X and Y axes. 

• Amend existing fields by selecting the existing dropdown. 
• To add additional fields, click Add Field.
• Another field dropdown will appear; select your field from this list, e.g., Customer Frequency. 
• You can use the search bar functionality at the top of the dropdown to look for a specific field. 
  
  

 

• To delete a field, click the X on the dropdown.