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Retail expansion analytics
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United States
Retail expansion analytics to rank your next US markets
Compare candidate markets on foot traffic, drive time, competitor brands and overlap with your stores. Start with a free test of one candidate location.
Get a free analysis of your locations
Up to 5 locations. No cost, no commitment.
We handle your details in line with the CCPA and applicable US state privacy laws.
Retail expansion analytics puts numbers behind the question of where to open next. Huq lets you compare candidate markets on foot traffic and drive time, see where competitor brands already trade, and check how much a new site's catchment overlaps your existing stores. It works for any US address, updated weekly, with more than 1,000 locations manually validated in each of Huq's 35 markets twice a year. Request a free test of one candidate location.
See how retail expansion analytics works in Huq
The overview video shows the Huq platform from the Explore map through to Projects. Look for the travel time and brand location layers and how they combine with foot traffic for any area. For retail expansion analytics, the same steps let you size up a candidate market, see who already trades there and keep the whole pipeline in one Project.
- Drive time and catchment: see how far a candidate site's visitors travel and whether your stores already cover that area.
- Brand locations and POIs: map competitor brands and complementary stores in each candidate market before a site visit.
- Projects: track every candidate site from not started to complete, and report progress to your real estate committee.
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is retail expansion analytics?
Retail expansion analytics is the data work behind an expansion decision: ranking candidate markets, testing specific sites and checking the risks before a lease is signed. It turns a long list of possible markets into a short list you can defend.
Huq supports three parts of that work. First, compare candidate markets on the same measures: weekly foot traffic, catchment and drive time, and residents versus visitors. Second, check overlap with your existing stores, so a new site adds coverage rather than taking visits from a store you already have. Third, map competitor presence: brand locations and POIs on the Explore map, plus the visits nearby competitors draw.
Because Huq measures any address, you can test a market before you trade there, using the same yardstick as your best stores. Huq doesn't build sales forecasts, but its data feeds, Parquet or CSV files delivered to Amazon S3 or Google Cloud Storage, can go into the models your team already uses.
What's in your retail expansion analytics report
01
Candidate market comparison
Foot traffic, catchment and drive time for each candidate market, side by side, so you can rank them on evidence.
02
Overlap with your existing stores
Cross-visitation shows how many visitors a candidate site shares with your nearby stores before you commit.
03
Competitor presence
Competitor brand locations, weekly visits and catchments in each market, showing how contested it already is.
04
Benchmark against your best store
Compare each candidate site with a top-performing store on visits, dwell time and visit frequency.
What a retail expansion analytics report shows
A sample expansion test: one candidate location measured against your best-performing store and the competition.
01
Candidate markets ranked on foot traffic
Each candidate market's weekly visits and catchment on one table, so the strongest options stand out before site visits begin.
02
Catchment overlap with your existing stores
Shared vs unique visitors between the candidate site and your nearest stores. High overlap is an early warning of cannibalization.
03
Competitor foot traffic in the candidate market
Visits to the main competitors near the candidate site. Strong competitor traffic can confirm demand or show a crowded market.
Retail expansion analytics for any US market
Huq covers any address in the United States: shopping centers, main streets, downtowns, strip malls, 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 expansion teams use Huq for retail expansion analytics
- Huq publishes its accuracy by country: a 19.5% median error across published markets, against a 30% healthy threshold.
- Huq's customers give it an NPS of 42.
- Trusted by 300+ organizations 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 national brands: choose locations, track store performance and benchmark against competitors.
02
Retail real estate owners
Show shopping center 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
- Foot traffic: by week, month and year, with totals, average daily foot traffic, trends, period-over-period change, and visiting vs passing traffic.
- Residents and visitors.
- Trade area and travel time: trade areas by ZIP code, plus drive-time and travel-time analysis.
- Demographics and profiling: age, gender and purchasing power, available in selected markets.
- Behavior: visit frequency, dwell time, time of day and dayparts, cross-visitation between up to 10 location pairs, and international visitation for tourism.
- Foot traffic density and transportation mode.
- Places, brands and industries: points of interest, brand locations and brand analysis, industry performance, shopping center and retail center types.
- Geo-spend: spend by volume and category, available in selected markets.
- Tools: the Explore map (draw any area or use layers for travel time, trade areas, shopping centers, retail centers, brand locations, industries and ZIP codes), 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 a retail expansion strategy?
It's a retailer's plan for growth: which markets to enter, how many stores to open, in what formats and in what order. Analytics turn that plan into like-for-like comparisons of candidate markets on foot traffic, catchment and competitor activity. UK retailer JD Sports used Huq to make its catchment analysis 25% more precise and cut new-store location risk by 18%.
How do you choose which markets to expand into?
Start with a long list, then compare each market on the same measures: weekly foot traffic in the target trade areas, drive time, where visitors come from, competitor brand locations and visits, and overlap with your existing stores. Benchmark each against your best stores. The markets that look most like your winners go to the short list.
How do you know if a market can support another store without cannibalizing?
Measure overlap before you open. Huq's cross-visitation shows the share of visitors a candidate site would share with your existing stores, for up to 10 location pairs at once. Low overlap means new coverage. High overlap means the new store may mostly move visits from your own network.
What do I get in the free analysis?
Give us one candidate location and one of your best-performing stores. We send back a comparison of weekly foot traffic, where visitors come from and the overlap between the two sites, so you can see how the candidate measures up.
How often is the data updated?
Weekly. That keeps your expansion pipeline current while sites move through approval, and once a new store opens you can track its weekly visits against your projection and your existing stores.
Which US markets can Huq analyze for expansion?
Any address across the US, including markets where you have no stores yet. No hardware or site access is needed. Huq operates in 35 markets and manually validates more than 1,000 locations in each twice a year, so brands expanding abroad can compare international candidates on the same basis.
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.