Demographic reports can often be difficult to interpret, largely because on their own they lack context. The benchmark on a report is used to introduce that context, but often fails because it is simply a national or state average. Snapshot offers a full range of benchmarking capabilities – both as separate columns in a report or even as selected variables. Any geographic area can be used as a benchmark. Or take advantage of our advanced analytical benchmarks which put every variable in your report into its proper context.
Flexible Benchmarks
If the purpose of a benchmark is to provide context, your reporting system should let you choose anything as a benchmark.
Snapshot allows you to create benchmarks from any level of geography from national to block group using simple commands like benchmark = co:06037,06059, letting you add together Los Angeles and Orange counties.
Even better, run a report a specific site and save it as a benchmark – then use it as a benchmark for other sites. As simple as benchmark = file:myfile. Want a benchmark that uses the average of a set of your best locations? No problem, create a hybrid benchmark and use it.
Don’t want benchmarks at all? No problem either.
Advanced Benchmark Comparisons
How does your site compare to all other sites of similar size? For any variable in the AGS library, the Snapshot engine was used to create trade areas which represent theuniverse of possible sites by using population weighted block group centroids. Compared to other trade areas, we can express the relative score of a variable as a percentile (e.g. income is in the 82nd percentile) or as a standard score using the mean and standard deviation of the variable.
Percentile() and ZScore() benchmarks are available for selected variables – even when using standard benchmarks – or as report benchmarks.
These advanced benchmarks are ideal for automated processing. Quickly compute a correlation between a target area and any location using benchmark=zscore. Systematically build trade areas on a grid, then map and contour the correlation between target and potential sites, making hotspot or suitability analysis understandable and done in real time.
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