Getting started

MapDove combines three things in one workspace: foot-traffic analytics for individual places, market intelligence across a whole city, and a spatial decision support system (SDSS) that scores locations, forecasts visits and measures cannibalization before you sign a lease. This page gets you from a new account to a first result.

Every number you will see comes from a synthetic demo dataset modeled from neighborhood-level parameters. It behaves like real foot-traffic data — weekly rhythms, seasons, holidays, store openings — but it is not measured from devices or people. See Demo data for exactly how it is generated.

1. Create your account

1. Choose a plan on the pricing page. The Free plan needs no card and includes every demo city, 90 days of history and 25 site analyses per month.
2. Sign up with your work email, a password of at least 10 characters, your name and (optionally) your company. A workspace (an organization) is created for you and you become its owner.
3. Optional but recommended: open Settings → Security and turn on two-factor authentication with any authenticator app.

You can invite teammates later from Settings → Organization. The number of seats depends on your plan — see Plans and limits.

2. Pick a city

MapDove ships with five demo markets:

City	Country	Currency	Units	Neighborhoods
Austin	US	USD	imperial	16
Houston	US	USD	imperial	17
Phoenix	US	USD	imperial	16
Miami	US	USD	imperial	17
Dubai	UAE	AED	metric	16

Each city has 247 places across 14 categories, a hexagonal grid of roughly 0.8 km² cells with demographics, and a full year of daily visits (2025-11-01 to 2026-10-31). Use the city switcher in the top bar to change markets. To make a city your default, set it in Settings → Profile; the app opens there next time.

Imperial cities show distances in miles and income in USD; Dubai uses kilometers and AED. The underlying models always compute in kilometers.

3. Find your way around the dashboard

The left navigation groups the app into four areas.

Explore

The map of the selected city. Places are colored by category; filter by category or brand, search by name, and switch on the hex layer to shade the grid by population, income, daytime population or lifestyle segment. Click any place to open its place page: visits, unique visitors, visit frequency, dwell time, change versus the previous period, an hour-by-weekday heatmap, a benchmark against the category average, and its modeled trade area. The concepts behind these metrics are explained in Core concepts.

Market

City-level intelligence: total visits and change, share of visits by category, a weekly trend, top movers up and down, and performance by neighborhood. Rankings lists every place in a category by visits, and Brands shows each fictional chain’s footprint and performance across cities. See Market intelligence.

Site selection (SDSS)

The decision tools:

• Suitability — a weighted multi-criteria map of the city with the best candidate hexes (Site suitability).
• Huff forecast — predicted visits and cannibalization for a candidate location (Huff visit forecast).
• Catchment — demographics inside distance or drive-time rings (Catchments).
• Compare sites — up to five candidates side by side (Compare sites).

Each successful SDSS run counts as one analysis toward your monthly plan allowance.

Projects and watchlist

Projects stores saved analyses — parameters and results — so your team can reopen them. The watchlist holds favorite places and, on paid plans, visit alerts.

4. Choose a date range

Most screens have a date-range picker. If you do not set one, MapDove uses the last 90 days of available data. Comparisons (“change vs previous period”) always use the immediately preceding range of the same length. On the Free plan the earliest selectable date is 90 days before the last data day; paid plans unlock the full 365 days.

5. Run your first analysis

The fastest way to see the SDSS at work:

1. Open Site selection → Suitability.
2. Select a category, for example Coffee & Cafés.
3. Keep the default weights or nudge a few sliders — raise Daytime population and Competition if you want busy areas that are not already saturated.
4. Click Run. The map shades every hex from 0 to 100 and lists the top ten sites, at least 1.5 km apart.
5. Click the top site and choose Forecast visits to send it to the Huff model.

The full, step-by-step version of this flow — including catchments and saving a project — is in Your first site analysis.

6. Connect the API (optional)

Pro, Business and Enterprise plans include the REST API. Create a key in Settings → API keys, copy the secret (it is shown once), and send it as a bearer token:

curl https://api.mapdove.com/api/v1/cities \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer ms_live_your_key_here"

Start with the API overview.

Where to go next

• Core concepts — what visits, visitors, frequency and dwell mean here.
• Methodology — the formulas behind every model.
• FAQ — common questions about data, limits and billing.