Trade Zones
A trade zone is the area a location draws its customers from. It's the boundary every other measurement is taken inside, so the zone you choose determines which demographics, competitors, and market conditions count as relevant.
Three methods are available, each suited to a different question.
Where Trade Zones Live
In a study, a trade zone is anchored to a pin or to one of your existing stores. Select the anchor, click Draw trade zone, and set the method. The form prefills from your workspace default, and falls back to a 1-mile ring if no default is saved. See Shapes for drawing, linking, and combining them.
On the legacy Site Analysis screen, one trade area applies to the whole search, set through the selector in the top bar. See Site Analysis.
Ring
A fixed distance in miles from the anchor. Decimal values work, so 0.75 or 1.5 miles are both valid.
Rings are the fastest way to hold methodology constant across a lot of sites. They ignore road networks and barriers, so a 1-mile ring around a site split by a river covers ground no customer can reach.
When to use a ring:
Screening many sites against one consistent criterion
Standardized reporting for committee presentations
Markets where your organization already has an established standard
Walk and Drive Times
Travel-time boundaries follow the road network, accounting for speed limits and geographic barriers. Set a mode of walking or driving and a value from 1 to 60 minutes.
Understanding Isochrones
A travel-time boundary is an isochrone. Unlike a circle, its shape reflects how people actually reach the site. A 15-minute drive from a suburban site with highway access covers far more ground than 15 minutes from a dense urban corner in traffic.
Two sites with identical ring populations can have very different drive-time populations. That gap is usually the most useful thing an isochrone tells you.
When to use walk or drive times:
Evaluating accessibility from surrounding neighborhoods
Comparing sites with different road network characteristics
Urban retail where walking traffic is significant
Foot Traffic Zones
A foot traffic zone is built from observed visitor data rather than an assumption about distance. It shows where a location's visitors actually come from.
Anonymized mobile location data identifies the home and work locations of people who visited the area, aggregated into geographic zones so no individual is identifiable.
Coverage Percentage
A slider from 50% to 100% controls how much of the visitor base the zone includes.
50%
The core area where the most frequent visitors originate — tight and high-concentration
80%
A broader area covering most of the customer base
100%
The full geographic spread of all visitors
Visitor Origin
Live — where visitors reside
Work — where visitors are employed
Switching between the two reveals different patterns. A downtown lunch spot may draw heavily from nearby offices, while an evening restaurant pulls from residential neighborhoods.
Reading the Result
Foot traffic zones display as shaded regions, often with color gradients for visitor density. The boundaries are irregular rather than clean, because they follow real patterns: highway corridors, neighborhood edges, geographic barriers.
Demographics inside a foot traffic zone reflect only the population within that shape. Absolute numbers often come out lower than a comparable ring. The trade-off is precision — you're measuring people who visit, not everyone who lives nearby.
When to use a foot traffic zone:
Validating an assumption about where customers come from
Learning an unfamiliar market
Sites where drive-time assumptions don't hold, like urban cores and destination retail
What the Trade Zone Affects
Demographics
Population statistics are calculated for residents inside the boundary
Competitors and Complements
Only businesses inside the zone are displayed and counted
Sales Forecast
Analog models factor zone characteristics into the comparison against existing stores
Cannibalization
Overlap is measured between zone boundaries
Changing the zone mid-analysis is worth doing deliberately. Comparing a 10-minute and a 20-minute drive time shows how much of a site's potential depends on reach.
Best Practices
Start from your standard. Use your workspace default to set a baseline, then adjust when a site warrants a closer look.
Match the method to the context. Drive times for suburban and highway-adjacent sites, walk times for urban retail, foot traffic zones when you need ground truth.
Compare candidates on the same method. A 10-minute drive time and a 1-mile ring aren't comparable. Hold the method constant and only then compare the numbers.
Write down which method you used. When you share analysis or present to a committee, the zone definition is part of the finding.
For the metrics measured inside a zone, see Demographics, Vehicle Traffic, Cannibalization, and Competitors and Complements.
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