Placer provides visibility into overall industry performance and market trends across numerous categories and geographic groupings. The data is useful to understand macro trends when sourcing or doing due diligence, particularly when evaluating potential industries and public or private companies for possible investments.

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

1. How do you review and compare the performance of an industry or industries (e.g: car washes, pet care, or various retail categories) nationally or in specific markets?
2. What are the most popular chains in a given category and area? How does the local competitive landscape look?
3. How is a local market performing compared to other regions or nationwide?

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Review industry trends in your market of interest

a. In the top navigation bar, select Industry.

b. Click Add Industry and select your industry and region (Nationwide, State, DMA, CBSA) of choice (list of supported industries is here). Click Update Report.

c. Choose the date range of interest and click Apply.

d. You can review overall metrics (Metrics), visit trends (Visits Trend), YoY visits (Visits - Year Over Year), the change in the industry’s visit trends over time (Baseline Trend), and ranked chains for any industry (Ranked Chains).

e. Navigate to Variance in the left sidebar. Visits Variance allows you to compare industry visitation trends with the equivalent period in the previous week, month, or year.

Step 2: Use the Duplicate function to compare the same industry to itself in different time periods and to analyze performance over time

a. Click on the three dots and then Duplicate. 

b. Click on the calendar drop-down and select Advanced. In the right drop-down, select Filter per Industry, select the relevant dates, click Apply, and then Apply Filters. In this example, home improvement retailers in the Los Angeles DMA in 2019 were examined compared to 2021.

c. Scroll to Ranked Chains and you’ll see that while the top 3 chains retained their places, the brands below them shifted, including Ikea and Bed Bath and Beyond.

Pro Tip: You can access industry trends data at scale using the Industry Trends data feed. This data feed can be used to integrate up-to-date food traffic insights into your business’s internal reports, applications, and dashboard. For more information on Industry Trends or to request pricing information, click here.

‍