The Trade Area section of property reports enables you to understand where your shoppers live and work. See the differences in reach per POI and understand demographic and psychographic variations by trade area. Comparing your shoppers’ trade area with that of your competitors offers a deeper and fuller view of your store’s reach and performance.

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

1. How can you measure your store’s reach?
2. How can you see demographic and psychographic differences between trade areas? 
3. How can you see key differences between the preferences of shoppers?

Get started with the following steps:

Step 1: Use Trade Area Coverage by Distance to compare and contrast the reach of each POI

a. Navigate to Explore and type your POI^{Point (Location) of Interest.} into the search bar. Select your second POI by checking the empty white box in the center of the page or on the left sidebar. The number of POIs selected will appear at the bottom of the left sidebar. Once they are selected, click Open Report and select Property. This will open the Property report.

b. Navigate to the Trade Area^{Representation of the dispersion of home and work locations that drive traffic to any venue.} section in the left sidebar and scroll down to Trade Area Coverage by Distance. After adjusting Metric to % of Visitors, you will see the differences in reach per POI. In this example, the Pet Supplies Plus attracts a larger percentage of visitors who live less than 5 miles away (70% vs. 25%), which can help inform competitive advertising and targeting. It can also help when performing cannibalization analysis around opening new locations or predicting impacts from competitor locations opening nearby.

Learn about Trade Area Coverage by Distance

Step 2: Use Audience Profile to highlight demographic and psychographic differences between trade areas 

a. From the Property report page, navigate to the Demographics section and refer to Audience Profile. Make sure both locations are toggled on to be compared. This tool defaults to the True Trade Area but you may also compare Drive Times, Walk Times, and Distance in Miles.

b. Discover key differences between the people in these trade areas by using different third-party datasets from Placer’s Marketplace that are available in a drop-down menu beneath the map. Where applicable, you can benchmark datasets at different levels, including national, state, and county. If the dataset you’re looking for is not visible, click View more Datasets to add it.

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 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 Audience Profile. Use the drop-down to add PetSmart so a comparison can be made.

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

d. 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).