Track your success with accurate benchmarking against your competitors. Use a variety of visit insights at the store and chain level to see how your store 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 store's foot traffic against competitors 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 a store against others 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 POI’s ranking. In this example, this Pet Supermarket is the 2nd most visited store in its chain in the state of Georgia in the last 12 months when looking at Visits; however, when measured by Visits per Square Foot, this store’s ranking drops to number 8.

Learn about Ranking Overview

Step 2: Use Favorite Places to understand visitor preferences and true competition

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.

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 store 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 dataset 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 access to Retail Sales, understand performance, improve promotional strategies, and identify spending patterns

This feature allows you to understand the sales ($) volume and characteristics of a given competitor’s location, then benchmark those sales to its chain or the broader category, both on a state and national level.

a. To add a competitor, click the plus sign, add the location, and click Go.

b. Navigate to Retail Sales in the left sidebar. Here you can view a store’s sales in a number of different ways:

‍i) Metrics - shows high-level sales and transaction data for a given time period.

ii) Sales Trend - shows sales history by day, week, or month, and allows you to view sales or sales / sq ft.

By turning off the direct comparison of two stores and selecting only the competitor property (in this case, Smart & Final), you can also benchmark the competitor store against chain or category, and at the state or national level.

To view each location’s performance over several years, click on Annual Summary.

iii) Average Ticket Size - shows the average ticket size over time, with a similar ability to change how the data is presented and whether to benchmark against your store or against the competitor’s chain or geographic region.

iv) Ranking Overview - shows how store sales are doing overall, with the ability to benchmark by chain or category, and by sales or sales / sq ft.

v) Day of Week - shows spending patterns and gives insights into marketing opportunities by displaying sales data over the time period, giving numerous sales measures, broken out by day of the week or solely over the weekend.

vi) Transaction Trend - shows the number of transactions for each store, with benchmarking possible. 

By turning off the direct comparison of two stores and selecting only the competitor property (in this case, Smart & Final), you can also benchmark the competitor store against chain or category, and at the state or national level.

Step 4: For those who have added on the AGS Behavior & Attitudes dataset, identify shopper preferences within identified trade areas

a. To add a competitor, click the plus sign, add the location, and click Go.

b. Navigate to Demographics in the left sidebar and refer to Audience Profile. Use the drop-down to add PetSmart so a comparison can be made.

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

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

e. In this example between these two pet stores, both trade areas over-index for Organic Foodies (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