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Retail location analysis
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United States
Retail location analysis for your US stores
See how each store's location really performs. Benchmark weekly foot traffic, catchment and dwell time against nearby competitors. Start with a free check.
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 location analysis tells you whether a store's results come from the location or from how it's run. Huq measures visits to any US address by week, month and year, so you can benchmark each store against the street around it, nearby competitors and regional and national trends. See visiting vs passing traffic, residents vs visitors and where visitors come from. More than 1,000 locations are manually validated in each of Huq's 35 markets twice a year.
See how retail location analysis works in Huq
This overview tours the Huq platform. For retail location analysis, watch how you select a store on the Explore map and read its footfall trends, visiting vs passing traffic and catchment. Then look at Projects, which let you monitor every store in a portfolio, and the monthly PDF reports that benchmark each location against regional and national trends.
- Visiting vs passing traffic: whether people walk past your store without coming in, a sign of a store problem, not a street one.
- Residents vs visitors: whether a store relies on locals or draws people from further away.
- Projects and PDF reports: monitor every store at once and share monthly reports with benchmarks.
Trusted by 300+ organisations · Data across 35 markets
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What is retail location analysis?
Retail location analysis is the process of judging how well a location suits a retailer. It covers new sites, where the question is whether to open, and existing stores, where the question is whether the location is pulling its weight. People often use it interchangeably with retail site selection, but it's broader.
The usual inputs are local demand, competition, access, co-tenancy and cost. Traditional methods estimate demand from radius rings, drive-time zones or gravity models such as the Huff model. These predict where customers should come from.
Visit data shows what actually happens. If a store's visits fall while the surrounding area holds steady, the issue is probably the store. If the whole street is down, it's the location. Huq gives you that comparison for any address, plus visiting vs passing traffic, residents vs visitors and catchment, updated every week.
What's in your retail location analysis
01
Visits by week, month and year
Each store and its surrounding area, with period-on-period change, so you can tell a store problem from a street problem.
02
Catchment and visitor origin
Where each store's visitors come from, and how that compares with the area you thought it served.
03
Visiting vs passing traffic
How many people pass your store compared with how many come in, a direct test of the frontage.
04
Benchmarking against competitors
Your store set against nearby competitors and regional and national trends, so underperformance has context.
What a retail location analysis shows
The free location health check looks at one store. These are the three charts you'll see.
01
Store visits vs the local market
Your store's weekly visits indexed against the surrounding area. When the two lines split, the cause is usually inside the store, not the location.
02
Where this store's visitors come from
A catchment map with primary and secondary zones. Gaps close to the store can point to access, visibility or competition problems worth checking on the ground.
03
Dwell and frequency vs nearby competitors
How long visitors stay and how often they return, compared with two nearby competitors. High traffic with short dwell often means passing trade, not destination visits.
Retail location analysis across the US
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 retailers use Huq to analyze store locations
- 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 retail store location analysis?
It's the process of judging how well a location suits a store, for new sites and for stores you already run. Site selection is the narrower job of choosing where to open. Location analysis also asks whether each existing store is performing, how it compares with nearby competitors, and whether a weak store needs a fix or a move.
What factors matter in retail site selection?
Local demand, competition, access and visibility, co-tenancy and occupancy cost. Huq covers the location side: visits, visiting vs passing traffic, residents vs visitors, where visitors come from, dwell time and nearby brands. Add your own sales and cost data to see how well each store turns those visits into revenue.
How do you tell if it's the store or the location?
Compare the store's foot traffic with the area around it. If the area holds steady while your visits fall, look at the store itself. If both fall together, the location is changing. UK restaurant chain PizzaExpress used Huq foot traffic alongside sales data to separate location problems from operational ones.
What's in the free location health check?
We'll run a location health check on one of your US stores: weekly foot traffic against the local market, a catchment map showing where visitors come from, and a dwell time and visit frequency comparison with nearby competitors. There's no commitment.
How often is the data updated?
Weekly. Store and area visits refresh every week, so you can spot a decline as it starts rather than at the next quarterly review, and check whether a change at the store, like a remodel or new hours, actually moved traffic.
Which US locations can Huq analyze?
Any address across the US, including your own stores, candidate sites and competitor locations. Huq needs no sensors, cameras or hardware, and more than 1,000 locations are manually validated in each of its 35 markets twice a year, so you can analyze a store you don't operate the same way as one you do.
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.