What to Look for in a Location Intelligence Tool

Location decisions are often worth millions, yet many are still made on partial data: annualised averages for areas far wider than the site in question, reports that are out of date by the time they arrive, or a well-argued opinion with no evidence behind it. A good location intelligence tool closes that gap. It gives you current, validated figures for the exact place you're deciding on, and numbers you can defend when someone asks where they came from.

This guide sets out what actually separates a location intelligence tool you can build decisions on from one that simply presents well. It covers the main types of location intelligence solutions, the ten things worth checking before you buy, the questions to put to every provider on your shortlist, and how to run a trial that tells you something useful.

What is a location intelligence tool?

A location intelligence tool is software that turns data about where people go, who they are, how long they stay and what they spend into answers about specific places. Retailers use it to choose and validate sites, landlords to prove footfall and defend rents, councils to measure high street performance, and investors to underwrite retail and mixed-use assets.

The best location intelligence tools don’t just show data on a map. They answer the question behind it: is this a good site, is this asset performing, did this intervention work?

The main types of location intelligence solutions

Before comparing individual providers, it helps to know which kind of solution you’re actually looking at. Most location intelligence solutions fall into one of four groups, and they solve quite different problems.

• Data feeds. Raw movement, demographic or points-of-interest data delivered as files or through an API. Often strong data, but no interface and no analysis layer. You’ll need an analyst, or a separate tool, to turn it into an answer.
• Dashboard-led platforms. A polished interface over data you can’t easily interrogate or check. Good for a headline chart, less good when someone asks where the number came from.
• GIS software. Powerful mapping and spatial analysis tools, built for specialists. Excellent for analysts, but they need data to be fed into them rather than supplying it themselves.
• Self-serve analytical platforms. Validated data and the analysis layer in one place, so a leasing manager or a town centre officer can get a decision-ready answer without waiting on an analyst, while a data team gets the same depth underneath.

It’s also worth separating any of these from in-store people counters. Sensors measure what happens inside your own four walls. Location intelligence measures what happens across a whole market, including places you don’t own and competitors you’d like to understand. Both have their uses, but they answer different questions.

What to look for in a location intelligence tool: 10 things that matter

1. Accuracy you can see, not accuracy you’re asked to trust

This is the single most important thing to check, and the one most often glossed over. Every provider will tell you their data is accurate. Far fewer will show you how accurate, against what, and how often they check.

Ask for published accuracy figures, broken down by country. Ask what the estimates are compared against, and whether that comparison is ongoing or was done once at launch. A provider confident in its data will answer all of that directly. One that can’t is asking you to put your name to a black box.

We look at this question in much more detail in How Accurate Is Footfall Data, Really?

2. Coverage in every market you operate in, metric by metric

Ask which markets are covered and which datasets are available in each, so you can match the tool to where you operate today and where you’re expanding next.

If you operate across the UK and continental Europe, or are expanding into the Middle East, a tool that covers only one of those regions simply adds another provider to your stack rather than replacing any.

3. The full picture from one dataset

A location decision rarely rests on footfall alone. The strongest location intelligence tools answer six questions in one place:

When each of those sits in a different tool, the numbers are built on different assumptions, dates and geographies, and they rarely line up. One platform, one unified view, means one version of the truth.

4. The ability to measure the exact area you care about

Annualised averages for a whole postcode district or town are of limited use when you’re deciding between two units on the same street. Look for a tool that lets you draw or upload the exact areas you want to measure, whether that’s a single store, a shopping centre, a stretch of high street or a group of competitor sites, and returns figures for those areas specifically. Catchment should be mappable to postcode level, with options for drive-time or custom zones.

5. Fresh data, and a long enough history

A report that’s already months old when it arrives is a snapshot of a market that has moved on. Look for footfall updated weekly, with daypart and day-of-week detail so you can see when people visit, not just how many.

History matters just as much. Year-on-year comparisons, seasonal patterns and pre and post comparisons all depend on a baseline that already exists. A council measuring the impact of a regeneration scheme, or a retailer checking whether a new competitor has affected trading, can’t install a baseline retrospectively.

6. Benchmarking built in, not bolted on

A footfall number on its own tells you very little. Is 40,000 visitors a week good? Only in comparison with something: your best-performing stores, a competing scheme, a comparator town. Look for benchmarking as a core feature, so every location can be compared against your own network and against the wider market without exporting data into a spreadsheet first.

7. Genuinely self-serve for non-technical users

Many tools describe themselves as self-serve and still require an analyst to get a usable answer out of them. The test is simple: can someone on your leasing, estates or town centre team, with no data background, answer a real question on their own, in minutes rather than days?

Look for ready-made question templates, ranked and structured answers rather than raw exports, and an interface built for business users, not just analysts. If every question goes through one power user, you haven’t removed the bottleneck, you’ve moved it.

8. Outputs that work outside the platform

The answer usually has to go somewhere: a board paper, an investment committee pack, a rent review, a funding bid. Check that the tool produces reports you’d be happy to put in front of a board as they are.

If you have a data team, check too that the same data can be delivered as a scheduled feed into your own cloud storage and BI tools, such as Tableau, Power BI or Looker, so it can be blended with your internal sales data. Ideally the feed and the platform share the same structure, so analysts and business users are working from identical figures.

9. Privacy and compliance you can explain to your legal team

Movement data needs to be collected with consent, anonymised and aggregated before anyone sees it, and compliant with GDPR and other applicable regulation. Ask how the provider handles this in plain terms. If they can’t explain it clearly to you, you’ll struggle to explain it to your own compliance team.

10. A partner with experience in your sector

The best location intelligence companies understand the decisions their data supports. Ask who else in your sector uses the tool, what they use it for, and what onboarding and support look like after the contract is signed. A provider that works with retailers, landlords and councils will already know the difference between a leasing question and a site selection question, and will set the platform up accordingly.

Questions to ask location intelligence companies before you buy

Once you have a shortlist, put the same questions to every provider. How they answer tells you as much as what they say.

How to run a trial that tells you something

A demo shows you what the provider wants you to see. A trial should show you what you need to know. To get the most out of one:

• Test sites you already know well. Pick three to five locations where you have your own trading data or counts, and see whether the tool’s picture matches what you know.
• Include a market on your expansion roadmap. Check the depth of data available where you’ll need it next.
• Hand it to a non-technical user. Ask someone from leasing or estates to answer a real question on their own, and time how long it takes.
• Export something. Produce a report or a data extract and check whether it would go into a board paper or your BI tool as it is.

If the tool performs well on sites you know, you can trust it on sites you don’t. That’s the whole point of the exercise.

Where Huq fits in

Huq is a location intelligence company built around the checklist above. Its platform brings footfall and catchment, demographics, dwell time and visit frequency, consumer spend, daypart patterns and benchmarking together in one platform, trusted by more than 300 organisations including Nike, JD Group and adidas.

Accuracy is published, not asserted. Huq’s footfall estimates are validated on an ongoing basis against hundreds of external, authoritative figures, with accuracy published by country: currently 85.5% in Germany and 81.9% in Great Britain, against an industry benchmark of around 65%.

The platform is genuinely self-serve. You define the areas that matter to you, pick a question and get a structured, ranked answer in minutes, with no analyst required. The same data is available as a scheduled feed into Tableau, Power BI, Looker or your own models, so business users and data teams work from the same numbers. Coverage spans 22 markets across the UK, Europe, the Middle East and beyond, with spend data available in the UK.

If you’re comparing location intelligence tools, the quickest way to test Huq against the list above is to try it on sites you already know. Start a free trial, or book a demo with the team.

A good location intelligence tool should give you a number you can defend in the room where the decision gets made. See how Huq’s platform answers the questions above, in one place, in minutes rather than weeks.