About Analysis
The Analysis section of Business Analyst contains sophisticated yet easy-to-use tools to help solve complicated business problems. Working progressively through the Business Analyst menu, a typical analysis technique involves input from previous Business Analyst steps. Each analysis tool requires some type of point or polygon input, such as geocoded points (Store and Customer Setup) and polygons (Study Areas, Trade Areas). Running analysis tools provides a better understanding of your customer base, demographic profile, and potential site selections.
Below are descriptions for different types of analysis included in Business Analyst.
Market Analysis
Append Data (Spatial Overlay)
The Append Data tool allows you to extract data from one layer, such as block groups, and add it to an overlay layer, such as a trade area that you have created in Business Analyst.
Rank Markets
Rank Markets creates an analysis trade area or report that allows you to rank geographies in your market using one or more demographic variables.
Summarize Points
The Summarize Points report allows you to quickly total the number of business locations within a given area and summarize site-specific values for your trade area or any other polygon layer such as sales volume, total employees, or number of transactions. The tool summarizes points within a polygon.
Market Penetration
Market Penetration calculates market penetration based on the number of customers within an area compared to a demographic variable such as total population.
Customer Prospecting
Customer prospecting allows you to locate regions with ideal demographic characteristics for targeting new customers.
Find Hot Spots (Grids)
The Find Hot Spots tool generates a grid of equal-sized cells based on your defined extents. You can create grid cells based on the current extent, study area extent, or extent of a feature in another layer. You can append demographic data to a grid cell to provide a normalized view of the data, identifying hot spots and areas of interest. The hot spot grid areas appear in red by default.
Site Analysis
Measure Distance Decay
Individual locations or pieces of geography often have greater importance, or more weight, if they are closer to an area of examination. For example, customers who live in a ZIP Code adjacent to a client's store are more likely to visit the store than potential customers who live in a ZIP Code five miles away. You may want to create distance decay trade areas that reflect the inverse relationship between distance and propensity to visit a location. Specifically, as distance increases, the geographic importance of a piece of geography within a study area diminishes.
Spider Diagram (Desire Lines)
Spider Diagrams show which customers visit which stores. A line is drawn from each customer point to its associated store point, making it easy to see the actual area of influence of each store.
Rank Similar (Find Similar)
The Rank Similar Sites tool scores potential new sites against a known, well-performing site called a master site. Two techniques are available. The first, or conventional, technique compares values for up to five variables between the master site and the scored sites. You will assign a plus/minus percentage of the master site value that you want the new site values to fall within. Sites are then assigned a score of 1-5 based on the number of variables that match the criteria you set.
Find Optimal Store Locations (Mean Store)
The Find Optimal Store Locations analysis creates a centroid in the mean geographic center of your customer points. Additionally, you can use clustering if more than one mean location is desired.
This centroid can be calculated by either of the following:
- Number of customers (taking only geographic location into consideration)
- Weighted value (such as sales or visits)
Proximity Analysis (Locator Analysis)
Proximity Analysis allows you to know who your closest competitors are or where their store locations are compared to your store locations. This tells you how many competitors fall within X miles of your store or you can also ask the software to run this report to list the X number of closest stores to your locations.