Even seasoned field operatives and veteran real estate consultants make site selection mistakes when intuition and experience are their only guides. And in retail, those mistakes can carry multi-million-dollar price tags.
Site selection software adds layers of analytics to vet and validate site options and explore opportunities you can’t find with intuition and experience alone. With site selection software, you can visualize your store portfolio with GIS mapping and predict how potential stores are likely to perform based on your customers, local demographics and foot traffic, store characteristics, and historical performance.
But more than that, site selection software builds confidence in your real estate decisions and helps make your location strategy repeatable. It empowers you to consider each location in relation to your portfolio, taking into account the potential for store cannibalization as well as its impact on omnichannel sales.
When determining which locations to open, close, remodel, or relocate, you don’t want to leave anything to chance. The right software can account for all the factors that affect a store’s performance, so you can trust its predictions and defend your decisions.
This guide will help you choose the best site selection software by identifying must-have capabilities and considering additional factors that affect the value a location intelligence solution provides your organization.
10 essential site selection software capabilities
Most of the differences in site selection software come down to the datasets they integrate, what criteria they incorporate, and how they leverage this combination of insights to build reliable site models. You can’t trust a site comparison if it isn’t built on the factors that actually impact performance. But even if a solution includes the right criteria, it will only be accurate if that criteria isn’t weighted properly.
Here are the essential site selection software capabilities to look for.
1. Traffic data integration
Traffic data is key to understanding how local demographics move through a trade area—on foot and in vehicles. Traffic patterns are some of the most valuable insights site selection software can deliver, showing where demand is concentrated throughout the day, week, month, and year.
Your site selection software should show traffic movement and give you tools to isolate demographics, time of day, and other criteria to see where your location is in relation to actual demand.
Tango’s site selection software, Tango Predictive Analytics, incorporates foot traffic data from Near and vehicle traffic flow data from INRIX. Together, these datasets reveal historical and real-time movement patterns that enable you to build your portfolio where demand is most concentrated.
Key questions to ask about traffic data integration:
- Where do you source your traffic data from?
- Can your site selection software isolate traffic data by days, times, and months to identify patterns?
- Does it display historical and real-time data?
- Can you tell where populations live and work based on traffic patterns?
- Can it isolate the traffic flow of specific demographics?
2. Site visibility and accessibility scoring
It’s not enough to be near the flow of traffic. Your store could be right in the center of local commerce activity, but if it isn’t actually visible from the street, you could be missing out. And a site with excellent visibility won’t make a good comparison model for a location with poor visibility, even if the trade area and other site characteristics are comparable.
Same with accessibility. No matter how prominently placed your business may be, it won’t perform well if customers have to turn across multiple lanes of traffic, park down the street, or walk through another business to get to your store.
Site selection software is only reliable if it includes a process for evaluating a location’s visibility and accessibility, particularly in relation to traffic flow. Tango Predictive Analytics lets you objectively and consistently score stores based on their visibility scope, obstructions, signage, ingress and egress, access points, parking availability, proximity to public transit, and other criteria that contribute to store performance.
But the process and depth of visibility and accessibility analysis can vary widely from one solution to another, so it’s worth investigating.
Key questions to ask site visibility and accessibility scoring:
- How do you assess site visibility and accessibility?
- Can your solution determine visibility based on traffic directionality or visibility scope (the slice of a 360-degree circle from which the site is visible)?
- What components of a site’s accessibility do your models incorporate?
3. Demographic data integration
Demographic data is a staple of site selection software—but vendors don’t usually collect this data themselves. So it’s important to understand where it’s sourced from, and what you can learn and apply from the dataset(s) they use. Ideally, demographic data should be a layer of insight you can combine with traffic data to isolate the segments of trade area activity that matter to your business.
Tango Predictive Analytics uses several datasets to deliver comprehensive demographic insights, including Consumer spending data from Experian, lifestyle and economic indicators from Synergos Technologies, Canadian market data from Applied Geographic Solutions, and census data. By overlaying demographic data onto the trade area, Tango makes it easy to identify where your target market is concentrated and where they go throughout the day.
Key questions to ask about demographic data integration:
- What specific demographic datasets does your software use?
- How does your demographic data vary across the countries our business operates?
- What types of data can the software combine with demographic data to isolate our target demographics?
- Can the software isolate transient demographics to show the difference between locals and tourists?
4. Point of interest identification
Every trade area has points of interest where commerce activity concentrates—stadiums, museums, theaters, parks, and other large attractions. Your site selection software should identify, visualize, and filter points of interest in your trade area.
Even if POIs aren’t directly related to your industry, your proximity to them influences your access to customers within the trade area. You may also be aware of specific activities and businesses that are especially appealing to your target demographics.
Key questions to ask about POI identification:
- What types of points of interest does your software identify?
- Can we flag points of interest that are particularly relevant to our business, or establish custom POIs?
5. Competitor analysis
Your competitors aren’t going to hand over intel about their stores. But with the right site selection software, you can get it anyway. Advanced site selection software like Tango Predictive Analytics lets you create geofences around competitors’ locations to track anonymized mobile traffic that enters and exits their stores, giving you a better picture of their performance in the trade area.
As you compare potential sites, your site selection software should make it easy to toggle visibility of competitors and estimate their serviceable areas in relation to traffic. It should also be immediately clear what type of competitor you’re looking at and the level of competition their presence represents. If you’re an electronics retailer for example, you’re not going to want a system that treats Kroger, Best Buy, and a mom and pop shop the same.
Key questions to ask about competitor analysis:
- How does the software distinguish between a major competitor and a store with less overlap or significance?
- When determining a competitor’s serviceable area, does the software use a fixed or dynamic area?
- How does the software estimate a competitor’s performance and/or market share?
6. Store cannibalization analysis
Competitors aren’t the only stores you want to see on the map.
Store cannibalization—including sister store cannibalization, which affects your parent company if applicable—keeps each location in the context of a larger portfolio. When you consider adding a store to a trade area you already have a presence in, you want to account for the net change in sales activity, not just a new store’s isolated performance.
By utilizing your actual sales data, you can separate, quantify, and analyze sister store cannibalization to ensure individual location decisions don’t negatively impact the larger enterprise. Site selection software should give you the portfolio-level context that helps you evaluate sites in concert with your whole organization, not in a silo.
Key questions to ask about store cannibalization analysis:
- How does the software estimate the impact of cannibalization?
- Can the software account for sister store cannibalization for related brands?
7. Omnichannel retail calculations
Every time you open, close, remodel, or relocate a store, it affects the omnichannel experience. Even when they aren’t the point of purchase, brick-and-mortar stores can serve as inventory sources, fulfillment centers, show rooms, community hubs, and return centers. Their presence provides critical infrastructure and support for online sales, and the impact is measurable.
Using your sales data, demographic datasets, and customer data, site selection software should be able to reliably estimate the impact a location decision will have on omnichannel retail based on where online customers are concentrated.
Key questions to ask about omnichannel retail:
- How does the software determine a location’s impact on omnichannel retail?
- Can the software assess a site’s viability for pickups and returns?
- Does the software only consider current online customers?
8. Custom site modeling
Site models are what make it possible to predict performance as you move into new markets and make real estate changes. And they’re one of the hardest things for site selection software to get right.
Site modeling needs to incorporate all of the other datasets and criteria we’ve highlighted, plus the custom site criteria that impact your store performance. Maybe there’s a particular co-tenant your stores pair especially well with, or store layouts that consistently perform better.
Site selection software should bolster whatever site selection process you already have in place and help you measure the impact of your unique criteria. Tango Predictive Analytics lets retailers incorporate custom criteria, and our location intelligence experts also work through a set of targeted questions to ensure our software accurately models your stores.
Ask potential vendors:
- Does your solution allow for customizable inputs?
- What is the process for adding unique criteria?
- How will customizable inputs be displayed?
- How will these inputs be factored into the overall site model?
- Are there any limitations to user-added inputs?
With Tango Predictive Analytics, you can add custom criteria to your site selection model, giving you results that are fine tuned to your business’s unique needs.
9. Sales forecasting
Sales forecasting is where site selection software weighs all relevant inputs in a complicated algorithm to predict store performance. This is arguably the main reason retailers turn to site selection software—because the calculations incorporate far too much data for humans to effectively analyze and model manually.
It’s also what makes Tango Predictive Analytics the best site selection software.
Tango’s sales forecasts have a significantly lower margin of error than other solutions because they incorporate (and accurately weigh) such a wide range of site selection criteria. Site models are the foundation of sales forecasts, and many site selection software solutions omit some performance-related criteria or improperly weigh factors that aren’t statistically significant.
But sales forecasting isn’t magic, either. And if you can’t explain how your software arrived at a prediction, you can’t act on it with confidence. With Tango, forecasts may be unpacked and explained, lending credibility to your decisions.
Key questions to ask about sales forecasting:
- How does your software’s sales forecasting account for our business’s unique circumstances and characteristics?
- What’s the margin of error in your solution’s sales forecasts?
- How do you train and refine your models? How long does forecasting take?
10. White space analysis and retail void analysis
White space analysis and retail void analysis are specific business development processes retailers use to explore and measure the specific opportunities in a market or geographic area. Site selection software should give you the raw tools and insights to facilitate these types of analysis, as identifying market-level opportunities is a crucial step before building and analyzing a list of specific locations.
Site selection software may not always have dedicated dashboards for specific market research processes, but it’s worth investigating whether a tool you’re considering will improve your ability to explore broad opportunities and assess their scope.
Key questions to ask about market analysis:
- Does the software have dedicated market research workflows?
- Do we need supplemental datasets or additional tools to facilitate the types of market research we currently conduct?
- How does the software help our business transition between market-level and location-specific analysis?
Site selection software you can trust
Tango Predictive Analytics is a sophisticated site selection software solution that produces stunningly accurate site models and intuitive portfolio visualizations. In Tango, each location receives a site score and demographic score, so you can see at a glance how well it aligns with your target market and site criteria.
You’ll have intuitive ways to utilize traditional site selection datasets, as well as more advanced capabilities that give your location strategy a leg up over the competition. Explore each trade area with the industry’s only purpose-built online GIS platform, and see the possibilities—and problems—others are missing.
Tango helps your business make smarter location decisions faster. Want to see how?
