How Create Trade Area From Geography Levels (Business Analyst) works

The Create Trade Area From Geography Levels tool allows you to generate trade areas based on predefined geographies. These geographies can be Esri standard demographic layers or any user-generated polygon.

To select standard geography records, a tabular data file with geographic IDs must be generated from which to create the trade areas. This table will be used to select the IDs from the Input Geography Boundary Layer. Once selected, the features will be exported as a new feature class.

For example, if you want to generate trade areas based on a list of ZIP Codes, you would start by creating a table with all the ZIP Code records you want included in the table. This table may be a territory assignment file created by an external process. The ZIP Code records are then matched to the ZIP Code boundaries provided with Business Analyst, and a trade area is created with all matching ZIP Codes.

Nonmatching ZIP Codes will not be included in the output trade area. Nonmatching ZIP Codes are ZIP Code records in the Table Containing Matching Geography IDs that are not valid and do not have a corresponding feature in the Input Geography Boundary Layer.