Shelf visibility analysis

Overview

Shelf visibility analysis helps you understand how your product performs in a real shelf environment, whether people notice it, where their attention actually goes, and how they respond emotionally while looking at the shelf as a whole.

How to capture your shelf

You can test this two ways: take a photo of an actual shelf in a real store, or upload a video walking through the same shelf. For example, if you're testing a beverages category with three or four different shelf racks, you could capture each rack separately, showing exactly how the drinks are arranged on that shelf, and test each one.

How to set this up in Decode

Upload your shelf photo or video using a Media block (for video) or Image Response block (for a photo), the same setup as any other media test, see Set up a media block or Set up an Image Response block and view results.

Enable Eye Tracking and Facial Coding for this block. Since you're testing a real shelf rather than a single product, both technologies apply to the whole image or video, not just one item, so you get a full picture of how people scan and react to the entire shelf.

What you'll learn from the results

This won't tell you which shelf position is "the best" in absolute terms, it shows you where attention actually goes based on real eye gaze, and how people respond emotionally while looking at the shelf. In the results, you'll see:

• A heatmap showing exactly where attention concentrated across the shelf, based on real eye gaze points
• Emotion data, tracked second by second, covering engagement, attention, and up to seven distinct emotions, so you can see not just where people looked, but how they felt while looking at different parts of the shelf
• If you've marked your product or a competitor's product as an AOI, you get Time to Discover and Earned Attention specifically for that item, alongside the overall shelf heatmap

See Read media block results for how to interpret the metrics, and Pack heatmap interpretation for a deeper explanation of the heatmap specifically.

What to do next

If you're testing a specific packaging design rather than shelf placement, see Packaging design testing.