Track your success with accurate benchmarking against your competitors. Use a variety of visit insights at the property and chain level to see how your property ranks in its category or against its chain. Learn where else your visitors shop to gauge their favorite locations and understand the competitive landscape.

You’ll be able to answer these questions after reading this article:

1. How can you rank a location's traffic against others in its category or against its chain?
2. How can you better understand where else your visitors are shopping?
3. What are my visitors’ preferences compared to those of my competitors?

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Use Rankings to gauge performance

a. Open the Placer report for your POI^{Point (Location) of Interest.}. Navigate to the Ranking^{Shows where the venue/complex is ranked within its chain and/or category.} section in the left sidebar.

b. You can choose to rank the traffic for this POI against other POIs in its category (i.e. community shopping centers, grocery stores, superstores), or against its chain (Whole Foods, Panera Bread). You can also rank using total Visits or Visits per Square Foot.

c. You will see the POI’s rankings at the national, state (including options for DMA or CBSA), and local mileage ring granularities.

d. The Ranking Index section at the bottom of the page allows for a filtered view of the ranked POIs. In this example, Madison Yards is the 6th most-visited shopping center within 5 miles; however, when measured by Visits per Square Foot, Madison Yards is #1. This is great competitive intel for marketing.

Learn about Ranking Overview

Step 2: Use Favorite Places to understand visitor preferences and what competition truly is

a. From the Property report page, navigate to the Visitor Journey^{The flow of commercial activity to and from any property that shows the top "Prior" and "Post" locations.} section. Scroll down to Favorite Places. 

Learn about Visitor Journey

b. Adjust filters as needed to narrow down the categories of interest. Set the minimum visits to your preferred number (this applies to the POIs in this list, not your center POI). This will narrow the list to where your visitors cross-shop^{Places that visitors to your location or center have also visited during the selected time frame.} the most.

Learn about Favorite Places

Pro Tip: Customers with the AGS Behaviors & Attitudes add-on can clearly see key differences between the preferences of the shoppers in their trade area^{Representation of the dispersion of home and work locations that drive traffic to any venue.} vs. a competitive trade area.

Step 3: For those who have added on the AGS Behavior & Attitudes dataset, identify shopper preferences within identified trade areas

a. Navigate to Demographics in the left sidebar and refer to the Audience Profile section.

b. Select the trade area type you’d like to use for the report (True Trade Area, Drive Time, Walk Time, or Distance in Miles).

c. Select AGS Behaviors & Attitudes as the dataset of choice from the drop-down menu. If the dataset is not visible, click View more Datasets from the menu.

d. Use the drop-down to add Cumberland Mall so a comparison can be made. In this example for these two competitive malls, the trade areas over-index for Wine Drinkers with an index of 110 and 103 respectively compared to the national average (index scores can be read as percentages. For example, a score of 110 can be inferred to mean that the figure is 10% above the base average of 100; a score of 90 represents a figure 10% below the base average).

Learn about Trade Area