msujan

 by Mehak Sujan

Hello everyone! 

Do you like using the ESRI Business Analyst Online Benchmark Report task?  Well, running a benchmark analysis to compare multiple trade areas against one another is great.  You can pretty easily compare demographic and marketing variables between one or more custom trade areas defined either by geographic coordinates, one or more standard geographic layers, or between a combination of custom and standard geographic layers, and leverage our extensive and priceless Business Analyst data .  These results can then be presented in different reporting formats including PDF, Excel or XML formats.  

But say you want to perform a comparative analysis between one feature/area name in a named standard geography layer (e.g., Zips, Tracts, Counties, and so on) and compare its demographic and marketing variable values against those of an aggregate named feature/area in the same named standard geography layer.  Now with our latest release of Business Analyst Online API, you can take advantage of a new feature in the Benchmark Report task that helps you do just this. You can do this by specifying a “single aggregate” trade area that combines multiple standard geography features (e.g. multiple zip code values) from the same named standard geography level (e.g. US.ZIP5) into a single trade area.  This way, when running a Benchmark Report task against this trade area, there will be individual summarization variable values for this complete aggregate area. 

Okay, so sure enough, you could create an application to execute the Benchmark Report task against “92373″ and “92374″ separately, and then with the S.XML return format, perform calculations with the individual returned variable values to create the so-called “single aggregate” trade area.  

Ah, yes, but…not really. 

With this approach, you would have to add unnecessary code on the client side and if you have to present oodles of trade areas, that would not be fun!
 

Furthermore, trying to do the math yourself won’t give precise values with variables which are of median or average types (e.g., 2009 Average Household Income or 2009 Median Value: Owner Housing Units) since you don’t have access to all the underlying data to perform these calculations.  Leveraging this functionality directly by using the Benchmark Report task is much easier and convenient.  

Additionally, this feature is especially useful in the case of a large number of standard geography features/areas where you only care about the variable values for these areas on a whole and aren’t concerned with the individual values for each of them.  For example, if you want an aggregate summarization variable value for 30 zip code features, it could be much more convenient to use this aggregate for analysis than each individual value.  

Attached is a sample application that demonstrates how you could utilize the new “single aggregate” trade area feature with the Business Analyst Online REST API by visualizing them in a table and a chart as depicted in the figure below. The values for the chosen summarization variables for this trade area are used as the benchmark.  Have fun with it and modify it based on your needs! 

Catch you later!