Shapes
What a Shape Is
A shape is any area drawn on a study's map — a polygon you trace, a circle, a real-world boundary you extract, or a generated trade zone. Shapes are named automatically (S1, S2, and so on) and you can rename any of them.
Every shape is something you work with directly. Select it, restyle it, comment on it, combine it with other shapes, or run analysis against it.
Shapes vs. Trade Zones
A trade zone is just a shape that's linked to a pin or to one of your existing stores. That link is what marks the area as that location's catchment, and it's what cannibalization reads from.
An unlinked shape is a plain area — useful for territories, regions, and whitespace, but it won't be treated as anyone's trade zone. Select a shape and check the Trade zone for row in the right panel to see whether it's linked.
Drawing a Shape
All three drawing tools live under Shapes in the map toolbar.
Polygons
Click Draw polygon (shortcut P) and click once per vertex. The hint under the toolbar reads "Click on the map to draw a polygon · press [Enter]/[Return] to complete it" — this is vertex-by-vertex tracing, not freehand.
Circles
Click Draw circle (shortcut C), then follow the hint: "Click for center, then click again to set the radius".
Extracting a Real-World Boundary
Click Extract boundary (shortcut X) to pull an administrative boundary in as a shape. Extract mode opens with the instruction "Click a boundary to save it as a shape in your study. Click again to unsave." and buttons for each level: States, Counties, Places, ZIP Codes, Census Tracts, and Block Groups. Everything you save in the session is listed under Extracted, where you can rename or remove it.
Trade Zones
Trade Zone Types
Generated trade zones come in three flavors:
Ring Buffer
Miles
1–30
Walk or Drive Time
Minutes
1–60 driving, 1–30 walking
Foot Traffic
%
50–90, with Origin set to Home or Work
Foot traffic zones describe where that share of visitors actually live or work, so the form spells it out as you type — for example "Where 70% of visitors live".
Drawing a Trade Zone Around a Pin
Select the pin and click Draw trade zone (or right-click the pin and choose Draw trade zone). The Add trade zone popover offers two paths:
Generated — "Ring buffer, drive-time, or foot-traffic %". Set Type, Value, and any mode or origin, then click Draw.
Draw a polygon — "Click vertices to trace a shape", for a catchment you want to trace by hand.
The new zone is named after its anchor and method, like P1·10 min drive.
Drawing a Trade Zone Around an Existing Store
Select the store on the map and use the same Draw trade zone popover. You can also just ask the agent — it draws zones directly on portfolio stores, no pin required. Because stores are workspace-wide, a zone anchored to one keeps working even as the study changes around it.
Starting from the Workspace Default
The Generated form prefills from your workspace's default trade zone, so most zones are one click. If no default is saved, it falls back to a 1-mile ring. Workspace admins see an Edit default link that jumps straight to the Trade Zone setting in Workspace Settings.
Linking an Existing Shape as a Trade Zone
Any shape you already drew can become a trade zone. Select it and click Link to pin or store in the Trade zone for row, or right-click the shape and use the same option. Search "Search pins and stores" to find the anchor; nearby stores are listed first. The × next to a linked anchor unlinks it.
Shapes an analysis created can't be re-anchored. Duplicate the shape and link the copy instead.
Combining Shapes
Selecting Multiple Shapes
Shift-click shapes on the map to add or remove them from a multi-select. Once two or more are selected, a floating toolbar replaces the drawing toolbar and shows "{n} shapes" with the combine actions. Shift-clicking empty map keeps the selection intact; a plain click clears it.
The combine actions are icon buttons. Hover one to see its name. The right panel lists the same actions with their names and descriptions, plus which shape is the primary one.
Union
Union merges everything selected into one shape — works with two or more. The inputs are replaced by the result, named Union: S1 after the first shape in the selection.
Intersect
Intersect keeps only the region every selected shape shares. If they don't actually overlap you'll see "The selected shapes don't overlap." and nothing changes.
Difference
Difference subtracts the second selected shape from the first. It needs exactly two shapes — with any other count its tooltip reads "Difference (needs 2)" and the button is disabled.
Deleting a Selection
The red trash button removes every selected shape at once — its tooltip names the count, so with three selected it reads "Delete 3". The right panel spells it out as Delete all (3) shapes. Like each combine, it's a single undo step — one ⌘Z puts the originals back.
Building Territories
Territories are built by union. Draw or generate a trade zone for each store in a market, shift-click them all, and hit Union — you get one shape representing everything that market currently covers. Rename it something like Phoenix Metro and use it as the baseline for planning.
Finding Your Whitespace
Whitespace is the same idea run backwards. Extract the boundary you're planning against (a metro, a county, a set of ZIP codes), select it plus your combined coverage territory, and hit Difference — the shape you're left with is the part of the market nobody serves yet. Drop pins inside it and run demographics to see how much demand is sitting there.
Data for an Area
Select a shape and open Demographics for an Esri profile of the area it covers: a KPI grid (Population, Median age, Median HHI, and more) plus race and education charts compared against national averages. Hispanic / Latino is reported on its own line below the race breakdown. Click View full demographics for the full variable table.
Demographics is measured across an area, so it needs a shape. Shapes made up of many disconnected pieces, like a Places boundary for a city with scattered limits, can be too fragmented to calculate demographics for — see Demographics.
Overlap and Cannibalization
Cannibalization is how much a pin's, store's, or deal's trade zone overlaps the trade zones of other pins, stores, and deals in the same study. For the Site Analysis version of this analysis, see Cannibalization.
What You Need First
Both sides need a trade zone drawn in the study. There's no fall back to the workspace default here — pins, stores, and deals without a zone are skipped silently.
No zone on the target: "Add a trade zone to calculate cannibalization." with an add button.
Nothing else to compare: "Nothing to compare against" — "Draw a trade zone on another pin or one of your existing stores to calculate cannibalization."
Select a pin, store, or deal and the analysis runs on its own; uncheck a row to drop it and recompute. When you ask the agent, the target has to be a pin.
Reading the Results
Results appear in the right panel. If the target has more than one trade zone you pick which to measure under "Select one of the drawn trade zones"; with a single zone the panel just says Based on that zone.
Below that, Overall gives the combined overlap percentage with a level badge, then one row per contributing pin, store, or deal. Uncheck a row to drop it and recompute. Full breakdown opens the full matrix of every trade zone against every source.
The panel is the answer — cannibalization doesn't add a new layer to the map. The overlapping trade zones are already drawn there as shapes, so you can read the geography and the numbers side by side.
Exporting Results
Cannibalization travels with both study export formats. Generate PDF gives each pin with overlap its own cannibalization page, and Download Excel adds a Cannibalization sheet with one matrix per target pin. Pins with no overlap are skipped in both. See Sharing and Exporting Studies.
Commenting on a Shape
Every shape has a Comments tab in the right panel with a count badge. The first comment box reads "Add a comment to this shape…"; after that it's "Reply…". Right-click a shape and choose Add comment to jump straight there. See Annotations and Comments for how threads, mentions, and notifications work.
Editing and Removing Shapes
Select a shape to get its style toolbar: rename it inline, change the fill color, switch the stroke style, or click Edit shape to reshape it — drag the shape to move it, drag a vertex handle to pull the outline around, then click Done editing.
Reshaping is only offered for polygons you drew by hand. Generated trade zones, extracted boundaries, and combine results aren't reshapeable; edit the source shape or redraw instead.
Delete removes the selected shape.
A trade zone drawn on a pin is removed when that pin is deleted. Shapes an analysis produced are owned by that analysis — deleting one removes everything else that analysis created.
A trade zone anchored to an existing store behaves differently: stores are workspace-wide, so deleting the shape leaves the store untouched and the shape never dangles.
Labels and Map Readability
Each shape's name is drawn inside it. When shapes get small or crowded, labels are hidden rather than stacked on top of each other — zoom in to bring them back.
Asking the Agent
The GrowthFactor Agent can do most of this for you. Try:
"Draw a 10 minute drive time around the Springfield store" — anchors a zone to that store.
"Merge S1 and S2" — unions them into one shape.
"Trim S1 by S2" — subtracts the second from the first.
"Show me where S1 and S2 overlap" — keeps just the shared area.
"Make S1 a trade zone for @pin1" — links an existing shape to a pin or store.
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