Easily track geo-specific demand with Location Insights

Published on June 07, 2022
Valerie Williams
Content Marketing Manager

Instantly view demand insights for your business locations

We know that no two locations experience the same type of demand. Whether you manage a restaurant, a retail store, a hotel, or any other type of business, demand patterns are unique to each individual location depending on what part of a city it’s in, what venues it’s near, and a myriad of other factors – including the types of events that happen near each.  

Events are one of the biggest external factors that heavily influence local demand. What if you could quickly understand what events are happening soon and likely impacting demand across any of your locations of interest in seconds? Well, you now can. 

Today, we’ve launched Location Insights, a tool that allows you to upload and track your locations of interest to identify the impact of events that are most relevant to your business. Not only will you get a list of events relevant to a specific location – it also provides detailed insights about the number of events, types of events, and the predicted attendance across these events within a defined time period. 

It’s a powerful tool for anyone on your team who needs to understand upcoming demand, including team members involved in or responsible for pricing, staffing, and inventory planning. 

Location insights can be found in Control Center, our web application (sign up here for a free trial). Location Insights includes several functions that make our data even easier to use:

  • Search for events around your business locations

  • View how events impact a list of locations

  • Sort by impact to identify your most impacted locations

  • See detailed pages for each location, including a map view and event list

  • See the total daily event impact for a location

  • Set up notifications specific to your locations to be notified when new events are scheduled

  • See locations and events on a map to quickly understand demand visually

Let’s take a look at how to use Location Insights so that you can get started by uploading your own locations to track what’s happening at each and update your planning to match upcoming demand.

1. Add your first location

Locations can be any type of location that you are interested in, including stores, hotels, restaurants, offices, cities, states, and countries. There are two different types of locations you can add to Location Insights:

  • Center Point & Radius locations are added by their address or latitude and longitude coordinates. You’ll also specify a radius for these locations. Add this type of location to track events near the precise location of an individual site.

  • City, State, Country locations are added by typing in the name of the city, state, or country you’d like to save. Add this type of location to track events within a larger geographical region. You can track multiple neighborhoods, counties, or entire countries depending on what your team needs.

Let’s review a couple of examples of each. Let’s say you are a regional manager at Burger King with multiple locations in the DMV (DC, Maryland, Virginia) area. You want to have a clear view of upcoming demand to better prepare for staffing your stores. 

To track locations with specific addresses, you’d select Center Point & Radius, and add your first location by typing in its address. Don’t forget to give your location a name. In this case, I’ll simply use the street name of each Burger King location I want to track.

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Tags are used to make it easier to search your saved locations. I chose the tag “BurgerKing MD”, as these addresses are in Maryland. The default search radius is 3 miles, but you can adjust it to be smaller or larger (we recommend testing out different radii to see the volume of events within a specific distance). You can choose between miles or kilometers. Before saving the location, you can click ‘Add Another Location’ to add multiple locations at once. 

After you’ve saved your locations, they’ll appear as a list under All Location Insights. Here, you have the option to search for a specific one of your saved locations, which is where the tags come in handy. You can also filter your locations based on which team member the location was created by. 

2. Get rapid insights into your business locations 

At the top of the list of your location insights is the total number of locations you’re viewing insights for, and several sorting options. For this example, I added five locations which have 167 events happening over the next 90 days.

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This list is a quick way to gather insights on how many events there will be within the designated search radius for each of my five Burger King locations in the DMV area– and if they are attendance-based, such as sports games, concerts, etc, it will tell me how many total people will be attending. 

The statistics shown in the list are automatically refreshed as events change to always show you what is happening in the next 90 days. This way, you can easily understand which of your locations will be the most impacted by events (for example, by predicted attendance and the number of attended events to show you possible increases in demand). You can also see non-attended events like school holidays, public holidays, and observances that could impact demand. 

The number of unscheduled events shows you if things like severe weather events (ex. blizzard, flooding, thunderstorm, hurricane, tornado) are about to hit a location. These statistics allow you to monitor what is happening in your locations in the next 90 days and make informed decisions about what action to take. 

As a manager responsible for operational decisions such as inventory for each of these locations, this view gives me the hyper-local knowledge needed to ensure stock and staffing levels match demand for each of my stores.

3. Click on individual locations for more details

Get more details by clicking on any of the locations, such as University Blvd, the first location on my list:

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When viewing individual location insights, you’ll see options to share a public version of this page with anyone in your organization with no sign in required, and to edit or delete the location. 

You can also create notifications specific to this location which will allow you to set up to be notified each time a new event is scheduled or an event changes within predetermined parameters you set for this location. These pages also include upcoming events on a map and as a list.

Scroll down for a summary of insights over the next 90 days, including predicted attendance, attended events, unattended events, and unscheduled events. Below this summary is a list of each event with full details for each one including its date(s), start time, predicted end time, predicted attendance, precise location, event category, and labels. 

PredictHQ’s pipeline uses advanced machine learning models to predict how many people will attend future events around a location, and that data is surfaced as the Predicted Attendance value for a location.

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4. Make data-driven business decisions

There are several ways different industries can use Location Insights to better understand demand around individual stores, and accurately match supply to demand on a local level. Check out some examples:

  • Hotel revenue managers can find events around hotels that will drive room demand and make changes to pricing, workforce, or marketing adjustments accordingly.

  • Consumer packaged goods companies can look at sales of goods for certain outlets, cities, states, or other regions and understand how they’re connected to events.

  • Parking garage operators can price their spots based on all events in their local area and not just the ones they already know to search for.

Based on the types of events coming up and their volume, you can make decisions about staffing, inventory, pricing, and more to maximize profits. 

  • For a retailer, there may be a severe weather event such as a hurricane driving down demand at one location— in this case you may want to cut down on the number of staff on the schedule for the duration of the storm.

  • At a fast casual restaurant in a central location, a sports event such as a marathon may cause a surge in demand for one day– in which case, you’d be able to stock up inventory in advance to prepare for more sales.

  • A supermarket chain could add their stores and warehouses as locations to see how events are disrupting demand around them. Depending on the number and impact of events, they may decide to reduce shipments, reroute suppliers, or increase stock of a fast-moving product.

To further refine your results, our team is happy to do a correlation analysis to reveal which event categories impact your stores, restaurants, hotels, or other locations of interest the most. How will your business benefit from accurate store-level demand insights? Claim your free 14-day trial to explore Locations Insights now.