How to choose between locations
Expansion questions come in two forms. Either you have a shortlist and want it settled, or you have a country and want the shortlist. There is a tool for each, compare_places and rank_places, and both cost 3 credits a call.
When you have a shortlist
Ask, naming two to eight places
Describe the audience once and list the places. Cities, regions or countries all work, and they can be in different countries. The same audience is measured in each, so the comparison is like for like. New to writing an audience? Size and locate a market covers it.
Compare Munich, Hamburg and Vienna for people aged 25 to 39 who pay for music streaming.
Read size and density separately
For each place you get the count, the share of the local population, an index against the places pooled together, and a rank by size and by density.
Vienna has the volume and Munich the concentration, and the headline says exactly that. Which one wins depends on whether your costs scale with the size of the city or with the number of customers.
Check what each name became
Each row shows what the name resolved to: Vienna as a municipality, Hamburg as a NUTS3 region, Munich as a city. City boundaries differ between countries, so look at the population column before comparing raw counts. Shares and indexes are the safer comparison.
When you need the shortlist
Decide what matters: volume or concentration
The ranking has one dial, from 0 to 1.
- 0 ranks by sheer numbers. Right for mass media, large-format retail, anything with high fixed costs per site.
- 1 ranks by concentration. Right for direct marketing, a specialist shop, a pilot where waste matters more than scale.
- 0.5, the default, balances the two.
You don't need the number. Say it in words: "I care more about concentration than raw numbers."
Ask, naming the area to search
The area is where candidates come from: a country, a region, or a radius around a point. Candidates are municipalities inside a country and neighbourhoods inside a city. Ask for regions when you are planning sales territories. Places and geography has the levels.
Rank Swedish municipalities for households that own an electric car. Top five, balanced between volume and concentration.
Read the ranking, and the warning
Each place comes with its reach, its local share, its density against the surrounding rate, and the fit score that ordered the list. Here Stockholm and Göteborg lead on volume, while Gotland and Mörbylånga, at 15% and 17% of households, lead on concentration.
When the weighting changes the winner, the headline says so. Ask again with the dial moved and see whether your first choice survives. A place needs at least 500 people behind it to be ranked, so a village with three electric cars can't top the list.
Going further
Places that look like your best ones. A common version of this starts from a success: "we do well in Utrecht, where else looks like that?" Do it in two steps. Ask your assistant to describe Utrecht and pull out what is distinctive about it. Then turn those traits into an audience and rank the rest of the country on it. The description gives you the definition, and the ranking applies it everywhere at once.
Next
Once a place is chosen, Understand a place tells you who lives around a specific site in it.