If your business had a map to success, would you follow it? Every market has hidden patterns—where customers come from, how they move, and what influences their decisions. The businesses that succeed are the ones that don’t leave location decisions to chance.
Location-based analytics transforms raw data into strategic insights, helping companies in retail, healthcare, hospitality, and beyond make smarter choices about expansion, marketing, and operations. Whether you’re looking to identify your most important customer groups, optimize site selection, or gain a competitive edge, location analytics is the key to unlocking new opportunities.
In this guide, we’ll explore:
- What location analytics is and how it works
- The benefits of location data for businesses
- How companies use location-based analytics to drive growth
- Buxton’s solutions for turning location intelligence into action
Let’s dive in.
An Overview of Location Analytics
Every business that uses brick-and-mortar locations to reach customers operates in a geographic context, and location analytics transforms that reality into a competitive advantage. It is the science of turning geographic data—customer movement patterns, trade areas, competitive landscapes—into strategic insights. It goes beyond pinning locations on a map; it’s about understanding the relationship between people, places, and behaviors.
By analyzing data such as foot traffic, transactions, and demographics, location analytics helps businesses answer critical questions: Where are my most likely customers? What markets have untapped potential? How is competition shifting?
Whether planning new locations, optimizing marketing efforts, or refining operations, companies that integrate location analytics make smarter, faster, and more confident decisions—reducing risk and maximizing growth.
Related: Using Location Analytics to Vet Retail Real Estate Investments
How Location Analytics Works
Turning raw data into actionable intelligence requires a combination of technology, analytics, and strategy. The process typically follows a structured approach.
First, businesses gather data such as observed visitors, transaction records, and customer databases. This raw information is then processed using advanced analytics and AI-powered tools that clean, filter, and identify patterns. Finally, the results are visualized through maps, reports, and dashboards, making it easy to identify trends and opportunities.
For example, a retailer might discover that customers consistently travel farther than expected to visit a particular location, indicating unmet demand in surrounding areas. Just as retailers use data to align with consumer demand, healthcare organizations can analyze travel distances for specialized care to identify underserved markets and strategically expand services, ensuring greater accessibility for patients in need.
Benefits of Location Data Analytics
From identifying growth opportunities to streamlining decision-making, here’s how location analytics delivers value across your organization:
- Identify high-potential growth opportunities. Location analytics helps businesses prioritize and optimize markets, as well as determine the best locations for expansion while minimizing risk.
- Investigate root causes of underperformance. Poor performance isn’t always due to operational issues—location data can reveal whether shifting customer behavior, increased competition, or market saturation could be impacting a site’s success.
- Optimize marketing investments. Location analytics allows businesses to prioritize high-value markets, refine audience targeting, and ensure marketing dollars are spent where they will have the greatest impact.
- Strengthen competitive intelligence. Understanding trade area dynamics, consumer movement, and competitor presence allows businesses to refine their positioning and design strategies that capture greater market share.
- Streamline decision-making and approvals. Data-backed reports help real estate teams illustrate site potential, making it easier to secure stakeholder buy-in and accelerate the site selection and expansion process.
- Save time with on-demand insights. Instead of manually gathering and analyzing data, businesses can leverage location analytics tools to access instant, reliable insights, allowing them to move quickly on new opportunities.
With location analytics, businesses gain the ability to act faster, smarter, and with greater confidence, ensuring every expansion, marketing campaign, or strategic investment is backed by data—not guesswork.
Related: Keeping up with Your Competitors: Is Location Intelligence the New Secret Weapon?
How Businesses Use Location Analytics
Across industries, companies use location analytics to answer critical business questions and improve operations. Retailers leverage it to analyze market saturation and determine whether an area can support another store, while franchises and service-based brands use location analytics to identify the best territories for new locations and determine how many units a market can support.
In the healthcare space, specialty health organizations use location analytics to optimize facility placements, ensuring that facilities are positioned where demand is highest. Large health systems also track patient demand to improve service offerings.
By integrating location analytics into their strategy, businesses can reduce costs, increase revenue, and make more informed decisions about where and how to grow.
Buxton Offers Location-Based Analytics Solutions
Businesses looking to leverage location analytics have two powerful solution paths with Buxton: a DIY approach using advanced mapping and reporting software or a custom analysis to drive strategic decision-making.
For companies that prefer on-demand, self-service insights, SCOUT, Mobilytics, and IQ provide intuitive tools for mapping, reporting, and analyzing market dynamics. SCOUT offers interactive trade area visualization, demographic overlays, and market analytics, while Mobilytics delivers foot traffic insights and visitor behavior analysis. IQ allows businesses to query geographic and behavioral data without requiring advanced analytics expertise. These tools help businesses refine marketing strategies, evaluate potential locations, and benchmark against competitors—all in real time.
For those seeking a deeper level of precision, Buxton’s custom analytics solutions harness a company’s own data and/or GPS data to build predictive models tailored to its unique needs to assess the viability of potential locations. With Buxton’s site score models, companies can gain even deeper insights with market optimization analyses that determine the right number and placement of locations in a given area and location optimization analyses that identify the underlying factors influencing location performance. These custom solutions provide data-backed strategies for brands looking to minimize risk and maximize long-term growth.
Whether businesses need fast, self-service insights or in-depth, customized analysis, Buxton delivers the tools and expertise to turn location intelligence into a competitive advantage.
Customer Story
A growing pizza franchise initially turned to Buxton’s SCOUT platform to support its real estate decisions, using location intelligence to evaluate potential expansion sites. However, the company quickly realized that SCOUT offered far more than just site selection insights.
By layering in customer data, the franchise was able to refine its local marketing strategy, ensuring that advertising dollars were spent targeting high-potential consumers in the right areas. The results were significant. The company’s leadership estimated that before using Buxton’s tools, they lacked visibility into much of their marketing spend. After implementing SCOUT, they could confidently say they understood where the majority of their marketing budget was going—allowing for smarter investments and better overall performance.
Ready to Get Started?
Location analytics takes the guesswork out of understanding customer behavior, providing businesses with the clarity they need to make informed decisions. By revealing patterns, uncovering opportunities, and delivering real-world insights, it enables organizations to act with confidence and precision.
For companies looking to refine their growth strategy, Buxton’s location intelligence solutions provide the insights needed to succeed. Book a demo today to explore how Buxton can help your business grow with data-driven precision.
