Market intelligence

The SDSS tools answer “where should we open?”. Market intelligence answers the questions that come before and after: how is this market moving, who is winning, and how do our stores stack up? It has four parts — the market overview, rankings, brand performance and benchmarks — all driven by the same daily visit data and the same date-range rules as the rest of MapDove.

Unlike SDSS runs, market views do not count toward your monthly analysis allowance. Through the API they count as ordinary API calls.

Market overview

Market in the app, GET /api/v1/market/:city/overview in the API (reference).

Block	What it shows
totals	Visits to all places in the city in the range, the previous equal-length range, and percent change
by_category	Visits, change and share of total city visits for each of the 14 categories
trend	Weekly visit totals for the city across the range
top_movers	The five places with the biggest percentage gains and the five with the biggest losses
by_neighborhood	Visits and change for every neighborhood

How to use it:

• Category share vs change. A category with a small share but strong growth is an emerging opportunity; a large share with negative change suggests saturation or a structural shift.
• Neighborhood momentum. Neighborhoods growing faster than the city are candidates for a suitability run with a higher growth weight.
• Top movers. New openings ramp up over their first 90 days in the demo data, so they often appear among the gainers — check opened_on on the place page before reading too much into it.
• Seasonality. The weekly trend shows each market’s season: Phoenix, Miami and Dubai peak in the cool months, Austin and Houston in spring. Always compare a range to the same season, or use the YoY trend metric on place pages.

Rankings

Rankings in the app, GET /api/v1/rankings?city=…&category=… in the API (reference).

Every place in a city and category ordered by visits in the range, with rank_in_category, change versus the previous period and average daily visits. Use it to:

• find the category leaders to study as benchmarks,
• spot under-performers in your own network,
• shortlist acquisition or conversion targets.

Rankings default to the top 50 (limit up to 500).

Brand performance

Brands in the app, GET /api/v1/brands/:slug/performance in the API (reference).

MapDove’s demo dataset includes 31 fictional chains across 13 categories (shopping centers are unbranded), from coffee operators such as Bean Republic to fuel chains such as FuelStop. For a brand you get:

Block	What it shows
by_city	Locations, total visits, average visits per location and change, per city
trend	Weekly visits across all locations
locations	Every location as a place summary
market_share	The brand’s share of category visits in each city

Typical questions: Is our average per location above or below the competing chain’s? In which city do we under-index on market share relative to our store count? Is the brand’s weekly trend diverging from its category?

Brand benchmarking is a highlighted feature of the Business plan; the endpoint itself is available on every plan.

Benchmarks

Every place page compares the place against its category benchmark — the average visits per place for the same category and city, at the same granularity (day, week or month). The GET /api/v1/places/:id/visits endpoint returns both series together (reference).

Related single-number benchmarks on the place detail:

• category_avg_daily_visits — average daily visits of same-category places in the city,
• percentile_in_city — share of same-category places with fewer visits,
• rank_in_category — position in the city ranking.

Reading the benchmark chart:

• Store and benchmark move together — market-wide effect (season, holiday, weather event).
• Store diverges from benchmark — something local: a competitor opened, a renovation, a change in format.
• Gap widening over time — the place’s structural trend differs from the category; see yoy_trend_pct.

The demo data includes a few deliberate city-level events to make these patterns visible — a spring festival week in Austin, a three-day storm in Houston in July and a winter shopping festival in Dubai. See Demo data.

Comparing places directly

To put up to six specific places on the same chart, use Compare in the app or GET /api/v1/compare?ids=…. It returns their summaries, visit series at the chosen granularity and 24-hour profiles (reference).

Exporting

On paid plans, the visit history of any place can be downloaded as CSV (day, visits, visitors, dwell_min) from the place page or GET /api/v1/places/:id/export.csv. Each download counts as one export. See Plans and limits.