.svg)
Retail location analysis
·
United Kingdom
Retail location analysis for UK stores and sites
Understand how each location performs: footfall, catchment, dwell time and competitors, for the stores you trade from today and the ones you're weighing up.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with UK GDPR.
Retail location analysis explains how a place performs and why, for stores you already trade and sites you're weighing up. Huq measures footfall, visiting versus passing traffic, catchment and dwell time at any UK address, and benchmarks each location against regional and national trends. PizzaExpress combined Huq's monthly footfall with sales across 370+ UK stores to separate location problems from operational ones.
What to look for in a retail location analysis
The overview is a general platform tour. For location analysis, focus on how one location's footfall is broken down: by week, month and year, and into visiting versus passing traffic. Bear in mind that each location's monthly PDF report then adds regional and national benchmarks. Read together, those tell you whether a store has a location problem or a store problem.
- Footfall trends and period-on-period change for one location
- Visiting traffic versus people walking straight past
- Where dwell time and dayparts appear for a location
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
%201.avif)
What is retail location analysis?
Retail location analysis is the study of individual places: how many people use them, who those people are, when they come and how the place is changing. It covers the stores you already trade from as well as sites you might take on.
It is not the same as site selection. Site selection is a decision about where to open next. Location analysis is the evidence underneath, and it keeps running after the store opens. A typical question is why one branch underperforms while another in a similar town does well. If footfall around the store has fallen in line with the town, the problem is the location. If footfall has held up but sales haven't, the problem is inside the store.
UK teams also use location analysis for lease renewals, refits, closure reviews and to judge how a town centre or retail park is trending.
What's in your retail location analysis
01
Footfall trends
Weekly, monthly and yearly footfall with period-on-period change for every location you choose.
02
Visiting versus passing traffic
See how many people come in to the area around a store compared with those walking past.
03
Catchment and audience
Visitor postcodes, residents versus visitors, plus age, gender and purchasing power for UK locations.
04
Dwell time and dayparts
When people visit and how long they stay, to match staffing and opening hours to demand.
What a retail location analysis shows
Three views give you a quick read on any UK location.
01
Monthly report against benchmarks
The monthly PDF location report sets footfall against regional and national trends, so you can see whether a location is beating or lagging its market.
02
Footfall density heat map
Heat maps of visiting and passing traffic show where activity concentrates around a store, along a high street or across a shopping centre.
03
Portfolio view in Projects
Put every store in a Project to compare locations, flag the ones falling behind and share monthly PDF reports.
Retail location analysis across the UK
Huq covers any address in the UK: high streets, shopping centres, retail parks, competitors' stores and sites you haven't opened yet. No counters, sensors or cameras needed.
Huq manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each of its 35 markets twice a year, and data refreshes weekly.
How it works
Step 1
Tell us your locations
Add up to five addresses in the form. Your own stores, candidate sites or competitors.
Step 2
We run the analysis
Our team maps each location from observed visitor data.
Step 3
We walk you through it
A short call to take you through what the data shows and what it means for you.
Why UK teams use Huq for retail location analysis
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall.
- JD Sports, a UK retailer, got 25% more precise catchment analysis and 18% lower new-store location risk.
- Ripon BID saw footfall up 164% year on year.
- Trusted by 300+ organisations across 35 markets, including the global insights, research and location intelligence teams at Nike, Adidas, JD Sports and Samsung.
huq's platform gave us valuable data to support a key decision on potential new sites.
Dan Brogden
National Sales Manager, Puccinos
Who it's for
01
Retail chains of any size
From five-store retailers planning their next site to global brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail property owners
Show centre performance, support leasing and get the tenant mix right, for landlords, asset managers and brokers.
03
Investors and private equity
Check how retail brands and assets actually perform before you buy, and monitor them after.
Everything Huq measures, in one platform
- Footfall: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily footfall, trends, period-on-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Catchment and travel time: catchment by postcodes, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power.
- Behaviour: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Footfall density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping centre and retail centre types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category at any UK location, via Experian.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, catchment, shopping centres, retail centres, brand locations, industries and postcodes), White Space Analysis, and Projects for monitoring many locations and reporting to stakeholders.
- Delivery: the platform, CSV or Excel exports, monthly PDF location reports, and data feeds as Parquet and CSV files into Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage buckets.
- Cadence: data refreshes weekly.
Frequently asked questions
What is location analysis in retail?
It is the study of how a place performs: footfall, where visitors come from, when they visit and how long they stay. Retailers use it to explain store performance, plan refits and renewals, and judge candidate sites. Huq measures it for any UK address.
How is retail location analysis different from site selection?
Location analysis is the evidence about how places perform, for existing stores and candidates. Site selection is the decision about where to open next. You need location analysis to make a good site decision, but you also use it long after a store opens.
How can I tell if a store has a location problem or an operational one?
Compare footfall around the store with its sales over time. If footfall fell and sales followed, the location is the issue. If footfall held up and sales fell, look inside the store. PizzaExpress used Huq's monthly footfall alongside sales across 370+ UK stores to do exactly this.
How often is the location data refreshed?
Huq data refreshes weekly. Every location also gets a monthly PDF report covering footfall KPIs, trends against regional and national benchmarks, weekday patterns, a density map, catchment, dayparts and dwell time.
Does Huq cover my locations?
Huq covers any address in the UK, from high street units to retail parks and shopping centres, with no sensors needed. Accuracy is published per country: an 18.7% median error in Great Britain against landlord-reported footfall, comfortably inside the 30% level considered healthy.
What is included in the free analysis?
Use the form to list some of your stores or sites you're considering. Huq will run a free analysis of footfall and catchment for those locations, so you can check the data against stores whose performance you already know.
Questions? Talk to us
Book a demoAbout Huq
Huq is a location intelligence company. We turn anonymised mobile location data into footfall, catchment and visitor insight for any place, so retailers, property owners and local authorities can make decisions on evidence.
See how your locations really perform
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.