Available with Business Analyst license.
Trade areas are polygon features used to help organizations define and analyze the people and places where they operate. Business Analyst includes a series of tools to help you determine the ideal representation of the areas you serve to make informed decisions.
The Trade Areas toolset includes several methods of generating and analyzing trade areas to apply to your organization’s needs.
Trade area geoprocessing tools
The Trade Areas toolset contains tools to build trade areas and can be classed into three groups: distance or time based, data driven, and spatial method.
Generate standard geography, distance, or time-based trade areas
Distance or time-based trade areas are the most commonly used methods for generating trade areas. They can be defined by straight-line distance or time, network distance or time, or by grouping administrative boundaries.
Tip:
You can use Arcade expressions in Generate Trade Area Rings and Generate Drive Time Trade Areas to apply different radius values based on input data or calculations.
| Geoprocessing tool | Description |
|---|---|
Generate Trade Area Rings | Generates circular trade areas around point locations based on your input radius distance. |
Generate Drive Time Trade Area | Generates distance or travel time trade areas around point locations based on input distance or time values and the underlying street network. |
Generate Standard Geography Trade Areas | Generates trade areas based on standard geographic boundaries such as counties. This is particularly helpful for organizations with clearly defined operating boundaries. |
Generate Geographies From Overlay | Generates trade areas by combining standard geography boundaries that intersect a set of input features. |
Generate data-driven trade areas
Data-driven trade areas allow you to take distance or time-based areas one step further for your organization. Instead of a predefined distance or time radius, these methods determine the distance or time it takes to reach a user-defined set of criteria. This can be reaching a certain percentage of point features in another layer or a desired count of population from Business Analyst data.
Tip:
You can use Arcade expressions in Generate threshold rings and Generate threshold drive times to apply different radius values based on input data or calculations.
| Geoprocessing tool | Description |
|---|---|
Assign Customers By Distance | Allows you to define a relationship between your customer layer and store layer if your data doesn’t include a shared ID field. This assigns each customer feature to the nearest store feature. |
Generate Customer Derived Trade Areas | Generates trade areas around each store location that captures approximately 80 percent of the associated customers for each store location. |
Generate Threshold Rings | Generates circular trade areas that grow from each point location until a threshold variable value is met. |
Generate Threshold Drive Times | Generates distance or travel time trade areas that grow along the network until a threshold variable value is met. |
Analyze and resolve interactions between trade areas
As organizations expand their footprint, trade areas may blend together. These tools help your organization resolve trade area overlaps through objective spatial methods.
| Geoprocessing tool | Description |
|---|---|
Measure Cannibalization | Identifies the overlap of multiple trade areas and summarizes geography and associated data for the overlapping area. |
Remove Overlap | Creates a new trade area layer with clean delineation between overlapping areas based on the selected method. |
Remove Overlap (multiple) | Creates new trade area layers from multiple input layers. |
Generate Approximate Drive Times | Generates an average drive time for each polygon feature based on the distance from the centroid of each polygon along the network to its boundary. |