Say you found a specific area in Downtown Waterloo where you wanted to potentially open up your fast food restaurant. You can specify an area to analyze by making a trade area around it.
Building Trade Areas
There are a few different ways to define the trade area of my potential location. Anytime you want to build a trade area, head up to the Trade Area Selector button at the top of the interface:
Rings
Simple circles may be the best way to go about defining an area. There are two ways to draw rings.
Ring: Click and drag to increase the radius of a circle and release to build it.
Rings (Custom): Specify a specific radius for your ring. Click to place a point and type in a radius size or make multiple rings by separating your values with commas.
Polygon
You can also specify a trade area by a custom shape using the polygon tool. Click Polygon and start clicking around your location. To close the shape, click the first point that you placed or double click the map.
Drive and Walk time
If you knew that people would only travel about 10 minutes to get a burger, you could base the trade area for your potential site on how long it takes to drive or walk there. Click on the drive or walk time tool under the trade area selector and then click the location to generate a heat map. Click on the context menu that pops up to specify a different interval of time or a longer distance.
