Foot Traffic and Brand Rankings
Foot traffic data transforms site analysis from theoretical to empirical. Instead of assuming how busy a location might be, you can see actual visitor patterns—both for the site you're evaluating and for the businesses surrounding it.
GrowthFactor integrates foot traffic intelligence throughout the platform, helping you understand not just what businesses are nearby, but how well they're performing.
Foot Traffic Heatmaps
Enable the Foot Traffic layer from the Layers panel to visualize visitor density. The heatmap displays warmer colors (reds, oranges) in high-traffic areas and cooler colors (blues, purples) in lower-traffic areas.
Use foot traffic heatmaps to:
Identify high-activity zones within a market
Validate that a site sits within the traffic flow
Compare relative activity between potential sites
Spot emerging retail corridors or declining areas
Foot Traffic Trade Zones
Foot Traffic Trade Zones show where visitors come from using anonymized mobile location data to map home and work locations of people who visit an area.
Coverage Percentages
The percentage slider (50–100%) controls how much of the visitor population to include in your trade zone boundary.
50%
Core zone—most concentrated, frequent visitors. Your primary customer base.
60–70%
Balanced view capturing regular visitors while excluding pass-through traffic.
80%
Broader catchment including most customers. Useful for demographic analysis.
100%
Full extent of all observed visitors, including outliers.
Visitor Origin Types
Toggle between two views:
Home Locations — Where visitors reside. Best for evening/weekend retail, grocery, restaurants serving dinner.
Work Locations — Where visitors are employed. Best for lunch-driven restaurants, convenience retail near offices, weekday daytime traffic.
Comparing both views reveals whether a site serves local residents, the daytime workforce, or a blend—critical for understanding peak hours.
Brand Rankings
Brand Rankings show how individual business locations perform relative to others in the same chain, based on foot traffic.
Reading Brand Rankings
Rankings appear as percentiles with color coding:
Top 25%
Green
Strong performer; outperforms 75%+ of the brand
Top 26–50%
Yellow
Average performer for the brand
Bottom 50%
Red
Underperforms compared to most locations
N/A
Gray
Insufficient data to calculate ranking
Small chains: For brands with fewer than 5 locations, rankings display as "X of Y" (e.g., "2 of 4") instead of percentiles.
Ranking Levels
Click any business to see performance across three geographic scopes:
Local
Other brand locations within ~15 miles
State
All brand locations within the same state
National
All brand locations across the United States
A location might rank Top 10% locally but only Top 50% nationally—strong for its market but average compared to the brand's best nationwide.
Why Rankings Matter
Rankings provide context that raw visit numbers cannot:
A Starbucks with 8,000 monthly visits in the Bottom 25% suggests something about that site is underperforming.
A cluster of Top 25% performers nearby signals strong retail fundamentals.
Multiple Bottom 50% competitors may indicate location challenges worth investigating.
Category Performance
Category Performance compares a location against all businesses in its category, not just its own brand.
Brand
How this location performs vs. other stores in the same chain
Category
How this location performs vs. all businesses in the category
Example: A Target ranking Top 45% within Target but Top 30% in Department Stores nationally indicates an average Target but a strong department store—the location has solid fundamentals.
Tracked Businesses Panel
The Tracked Businesses section lists competitors and complements with foot traffic intelligence.
Features:
Unique Brands Only toggle shows one location per brand (nearest)
Rankings display with color-coded badges
Distance shown for each business
Click any business to highlight on map and see full details
Quick interpretation:
Multiple green badges nearby
Strong retail corridor, proven customer draw
Mixed colors
Typical market with varied performance
Predominantly red badges
Potential warning sign; investigate site factors
Several N/A rankings
Smaller chains or newer locations without data
Best Practices
Combine heatmaps with rankings. A site in a high-traffic zone surrounded by underperforming competitors is worth investigating further.
Check both brand and category performance. Weak brand ranking but strong category ranking suggests the brand struggles while the location has merit.
Use visitor origin data to validate demographics. If your trade zone shows visitors from high-income areas, demographics data should confirm this.
Look for patterns. One underperforming competitor doesn't condemn a site; a pattern of weak performers across multiple brands suggests systemic issues.
Last updated
Was this helpful?