Placer provides insights into the overall visit and customer trends across retail industry categories and regions. The data is useful to understand macro trends, particularly when evaluating the impact and recovery of economic and regional events.

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

1. How do you review and compare industry trends?
2. How can you measure a brand’s gain or loss of market share over time?
3. How do you benchmark stores against their category regionally or nationwide?

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Review retail 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 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.

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