Study Areas and Projects

Study Areas and Projects

What are Study Areas

Study Areas enable you to pull valuable insights into the population residing around a point of interest. This enables you and your team to make more strategic decisions using the demographic data to review the localized market. There are a variety of options to help you achieve this, all of which we will delve into in this article.  
After a study area is created, the demographic data will appear in the profile tab for you to use for analysis. See the navigating the profile tab article to understand how to review the data and generate a report with the necessary data. 

Use Cases

  1. I have a potential site I'm evaluating but needs to see a breakdown of the population based on age and income to know if the clientele is suitable. 
  2. I know how far a client would typically drive to one of our locations, is there a way for me to see the population within this area for a potential site? 
  3. I want to analyze an area with approximately 50,000 households around a new site, can I do this in Sitewise? 

Types Of Study Areas 

Circle 

Use this option as an easy way to compare an area based on an equidistant ring size. Rings are a great representation of distance around a site and can even be used to help visualize walking distance in every direction. Check out the Circle & Drivetime Study Areas article.

Drivetime/Distance 

A drive time or distance study area can be used to visualize the time or distance a person may travel to the location by car. Based on where the pin is dropped on the map, the distance and time will be created by snapping to the nearest road and using HERE to generate an accurate representation of the area possible. 
Check out the Circle & Drivetime Study Areas article.

Polygon 

Polygon study areas allow for greater control if there are specific boundaries, such as parks or major roads, that define the area you’d like to profile. It enables you to use market knowledge to build more realistic study areas. You can create this study area type free hand. 
Learn more about this study area in the Polygon Study Areas article. 

Datafit 

Sometimes you don’t have a specific distance or shape and instead have a demographic target to hit. For example, creating a drivetime that captures the residential population of 20,000 people. In this case, estimating the drivetime would be difficult so instead we can use the Datafit tool. 
This tool can be accessed via the circle and drivetime study area popup box. 
Learn more about this study area in the Data Fit Study Areas article. 

Predefined 

A predefined study area uses an existing predetermined boundary such as a state, province, zip code, or DMA. This will appear in the profile tab but not be displayed on the map. Pulling data for a predefined study area is a great way to add a benchmark to compare with when analyzing a site. 
Learn more about this in the Predefined (Census) Study Areas article. 

Pre-Existing Polygon 

Polygon shapes from a layer, such as Trade Areas, Franchise Territories, or geographic boundaries, can be created as study areas to help you profile the demographics within the area. This way you don’t need to manually redraw the same shape in-order to pull demographics. 
Learn more about this study area in the Create a Study Area Using Polygon Data article. 

What is a Project 

A project is a workspace that can contain up to 10 Study Areas. A new project is created when:  
  1. Upon logging into your account 
  2. After refreshing your session in the browser  
  3. Selecting the New Project icon in the top left-hand corner of the screen  
Option one and two above are set this way by default, however some users prefer to always have their last project load each time they login or refresh Sitewise. Check out our article Using the Settings Menu for steps to change your default settings.  
Creating a new project by selecting  allows you to:   
  1. Name the project before creating any study areas  
    1. This can always be changed in the My Projects tab  
  2. Select the demographic data subscription for the project  
Each project is linked to a specific data subscription. If you have access to more than one demographic database, you can also change the subscription from the settings menu before creating a new study area. For more information about how to do this, check out the article changing data subscriptions.  

Working in the My Projects Tab  

Saved Projects can be accessed through the My Projects tab.  
This allows you to browse through or search for previously created projects. While you can only search based on the project’s name, there’s also functionality to sort projects by date created or last modified date.   
Click on a project to select it. A selected project will highlight green and expand to display the project’s name, data subscription and study areas.   
Once you have selected a project, you have three available options on the right side of the window: 
A screenshot of a computer Description automatically generated
  1. View 
    1. This allows you to load the project  
    2. It will also set the data subscription that the project was saved on.  
  2. Copy 
    1. Rename and select the data subscription of the copied project, while keeping the same study areas.  
    2. Clicking this option will make the Copy a Project window appear. 
       
  3. Delete 
    1. The project will no longer be available in Sitewise.  

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