A trade area offers a visual representation of different locations that drive visitation foot traffic to your store over a period of time. They are displayed as dynamic, gradient, or hexagon heat maps. View data by home location or work location, see how far visitors travel to reach your store, measure cannibalization by comparing multiple trade areas, and generate insights about populations living within a property's trade area.

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

1. What is the reach of your trade area?
2. How can you measure cannibalization in your trade area?
3. How can you gain insights into a trade area’s population?

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Use Trade Area Coverage by Distance to show the distance in miles that visitors travel to reach your store

a. Open the Placer report for your chosen POI^{Point (Location) of Interest.}. Navigate to Trade Area^{Representation of the dispersion of home and work locations that drive traffic to any venue.} in the left sidebar and scroll down to Trade Area Coverage by Distance.

Learn about Trade Area Coverage by Distance

b. You can select among four metrics to evaluate distance: percentage of Visits, number of Visits, percentage of Visitors, and number of Visitors. 

c. Distances can be viewed by home location or work location and filtered by visit frequency to understand the travel patterns of more loyal visitors.

d. Data can be visualized in a cumulative view, which aggregates visits at mile intervals, or in a distributed view, which distributes visits across different ranges of distance. Trade Area Coverage by Distance data can be downloaded as a CSV file.

Step 2: Use the Trade Area Overlap function to accurately measure cannibalization between stores

a. To compare the trade areas of different stores and locations, open the Placer report for your chosen POI and add another by using the + in the header and clicking Go.

b. Navigate to Trade Area in the left sidebar, then scroll down to Trade Area Overlap. View overlapping areas by land size and by shared population, select different types of trade areas (True Trade Area, Drive Time, and Distance in Miles), set a custom traffic volume for granular analysis, and choose to visualize the scale of data in a fixed or proportional view. Trade Area Overlap data can be downloaded as a CSV file.

Learn about Trade Area Overlap

Step 3: Use Audience Profile to gain insights into populations living within a trade area

a. Navigate to Demographics in the left sidebar and refer to Audience Profile. Analyze the trade area using different types including True Trade Area, Drive Time, Walk Time, and Distance in Miles. Customize each trade area type based on traffic volume. You can change allocation types, which affect how populations are counted in a trade area. To compare two trade areas, click the compare feature and add the second POI.

b. Below the map is a drop-down menu that contains different third-party datasets from Placer’s Marketplace. They provide new visibility into locations, markets, and visitors. Where applicable, benchmark datasets at different levels, including national, state, and county. If the dataset you are looking for is not visible in the menu, click View more Datasets to it. Audience Profile data can be downloaded as PDFs or CSV files.

c. To make a comparison between two trade areas, make sure both venues are toggled on (you can compare up to 8 properties).

d. In this example, you will see that while both stores over-indexed for Total Crime (AGS CrimeRisk) in the time period set, Ace Hardware had lower crime rates than The Home Depot.

Pro Tip: Customers with the Spatial.ai dataset add-ons can view more detailed differences in trade areas. Discover more about visitors’ interests, web searches, and shopping habits. For more information on Spatial.ai datasets or to request pricing information, click here. Customers with the AGS Behaviors & Attitudes add-on can clearly see key differences between the preferences of the shoppers in their trade area vs. a competitive trade area. For more information on AGS Behaviors & Attitudes or to request pricing information, click here.