How the number is built
Every count in Hexmark comes from public census data, a national dataset of places and the definition of a customer you set. Here's how they come together.
Where the data comes from
Population, households and income come from the US Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, at the level of the census block group, which is the finest neighborhood the census publishes them for. Competitor locations come from Overture Maps, an open dataset of places across the US.
There’s no phone tracking or purchased location data anywhere in it. Everything Hexmark knows about a market comes from public sources and, once you connect them, your own customer records.
How the count is assembled
You decide who counts as a customer: an age range, sexes, a household income bar and anything else that matters to your business. Hexmark applies that definition to every neighborhood in the area you’re looking at and adds up what’s left. Filters that use a modeled share are labeled as one, so you always know what the number rests on.
The map and the address report run the same definition, and an automated test checks that they agree, so the number on the map is the number in the report.
The report shows its working. The headline count sits above the population, the households, the income and the number of block groups it was built from, so anyone reading it can see exactly where it came from.
Mapped to where people live
The map divides the country into hexagons and fills each one by where people actually live, so a hexagon that’s half neighborhood and half open land gets the neighborhood’s people rather than an even share by area. Hexagons get finer wherever there are enough people to support the detail.
The address report works from the census neighborhoods themselves, calculated fresh across every block group your ring touches, so the count for a specific site is built at full resolution every time.
What we count as a competitor
Hexmark holds more than 16 million places across the US. What counts as a competitor is decided when you ask, by line of work, so supporting a new kind of business only takes a configuration change.
Each location is counted once per category, and places marked permanently closed are left out.
Checked against outside data
We’ve benchmarked Hexmark’s population counts against a major data vendor’s figures across a client’s store network, and the two track each other closely.
Getting your customers onto the map
You can start a 14-day trial on your own, and it runs everything that needs nothing from you: the map, the rings, the competitor counts and the locations you add yourself.
Your customers come in with help. Most operators keep them in a booking or point-of-sale system, so getting them in is a person doing that work with you, once the trial becomes a subscription.
A customer record here is an ID and a ZIP code. Names, street addresses, emails and dates of birth have nowhere to land, so no setting can bring one across later.
The map, the rings and the competitor counts all run before any of it is connected, and your own customers sharpen the picture from there.
See how your market's number is built
Bring an address and we'll open the count for it, down to the block groups it came from.