How to Read Your Location Score (and the Numbers Behind It)

Your report opens with a single number: the Location Score, from 0 to 100. It exists to answer the question raw counts never quite do — is this location good for my business? But a score you cannot interrogate is just another adjective with a number attached. This guide shows entrepreneurs and brokers how to read a Location Score properly: what it is built from, why parts of it are sometimes blank, what "preliminary" means, and how a few days of footage becomes a defensible estimate you can act on.

It is a companion to the foot traffic study guide and to how accurate video people counting is, where we go deeper on error bars.

Key takeaways

• The Location Score is a 0–100 verdict built from four weighted parts, not a mystery number.
• Blank components are honest: we leave a part empty and renormalise rather than invent data we lack.
• A "preliminary" score comes from a short sample; a full score needs a proper Location Study.
• Sampling projects a few days of footage to daily and monthly figures with a confidence interval — and a clip too short to project is labelled a spot reading.

What the Location Score is made of

The Location Score is a weighted blend of four parts, each scored 0–100 and then combined:

• Traffic percentile (40%) — how your street's volume ranks against a real city benchmark. Busy relative to the city scores high.
• Stability (25%) — how consistent the traffic is across days. A street that is reliable Monday to Sunday beats one that spikes once and dies.
• Profile match (20%) — how well the shape of the traffic fits your trading hours. A morning-heavy street is gold for a café and mediocre for a wine bar; the same street, different scores.
• Target share (15%) — how much of the passing traffic is the category you care about.

The weights are printed in every report's appendix, so nothing is hidden. A high score means the address ranks well, holds up across days, peaks when you trade, and carries your kind of foot traffic.

Why a component might be blank — and why that is a good thing

Sometimes you will see a component shown as "—" instead of a number. That is deliberate honesty, not an error. Two of the four parts need enough data to compute at all:

• Stability needs at least two observed days. From a single afternoon, we cannot honestly say how stable the street is — so we leave it blank.
• Profile match needs at least two distinct observed hours. One hour cannot describe a daily shape.

When a part is blank, we do not fill it with a fake neutral 50 that would quietly flatter or punish the address. We drop it and renormalise the remaining weights so the total still adds up honestly. The report lists which parts are missing and why. This is the same principle that runs through our whole counting methodology: never present a number we did not actually measure.

Preliminary versus full scores

A quick Spot Check gives you a preliminary Location Score — genuinely useful for deciding whether an address is worth a closer look, but clearly labelled as based on a short sample. A full Location Score comes from a Location Study with at least a full day of observation, ideally a representative week. The badge on the gauge tells you which you are looking at, so you never mistake a first glance for a final verdict. Both are real; only one is projectable to a confident weekly picture.

Reading the rest of the report

The score sits on top of numbers worth reading in their own right:

• Hourly profile. The bars that show when the street is busy. Match them against your trading hours before anything else.
• Direction split. Which way the crowd flows and which side is busier — set up when you drew your counting line.
• Category mix. The breakdown of who is passing. Note that some categories such as strollers and wheelchairs are marked beta and may not appear in every study — we flag them rather than overstate them.
• Benchmark percentile. Where your street sits against others in the same city — but only where we have a real benchmark for that city. Where we do not, we do not fabricate one.

How sampling turns days into an estimate

You did not film every second of every day, so how can the report quote a daily or monthly figure? Through sampling. We measure representative windows, then project to a full day, week or month — and, crucially, we attach a confidence interval that says how sure we are.

The projection follows a stated statistical rule: the more crossings we observe, the tighter the interval; the less footage, the wider it grows. But there is a subtlety we are careful about. That interval captures counting noise — the randomness of the sample — not whether the hours you filmed truly represent the whole day. So we add a plain-language confidence tier on top:

• Low ("spot reading"). Under about 15 minutes of footage. We report the count you filmed, but give no monthly projection — seconds of video cannot honestly stand in for a month, and we will not pretend otherwise.
• Medium. Up to a couple of hours. A projection is offered, with a clearly wider interval.
• High. At least two hours, or two or more observed days. This is where a daily and monthly estimate becomes genuinely dependable.

This is why capturing a representative sample — the advice in counting foot traffic with your phone — matters so much. More representative footage does not just add data; it moves you up the confidence tiers and turns a cautious spot reading into a number you can put in a business plan.

Putting it to work

Read the score, but read the ingredients too. Check the confidence tier before you lean on any projection. Match the hourly profile to your hours. Note which components are blank and why. A Location Score used this way is a genuine decision tool — and it is verifiable, because every study ships an annotated overlay and a public QR page anyone can check.

Ready to generate one for your own street? Start a $49 Spot Check for a preliminary read, or see what a full Location Study includes on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

What is a Location Score? A Location Score is a single 0–100 rating of how good a location's foot traffic is for your business. It combines how the traffic ranks against a city benchmark, how stable it is across days, how well its shape matches your trading hours, and how much of it is your target category.

Why is one of my Location Score components blank? Because we will not invent data we do not have. Stability needs at least two observed days; profile match needs at least two distinct observed hours. If your footage is too short to compute a component honestly, we leave it blank and renormalise the remaining parts rather than fill it with a fake neutral value.

What does a preliminary Location Score mean? It means the score is based on a short or partial sample. A full, non-preliminary Location Score comes from a Location Study with at least a full day of observation. A quick snapshot still gives you a useful preliminary read, clearly labelled as such.

How can a few days of footage predict a whole month? Through sampling. We measure representative windows, then project to daily and monthly figures with a confidence interval that widens with less data. A very short clip is labelled a spot reading and gets no monthly projection at all, because seconds of footage cannot honestly stand in for a month.