How does geomarketing help a business decide where to be?
Guides for people who are not geographers: the questions behind a location decision, the methods that answer them and the numbers to look at.
Geomarketing helps a business decide where to be by measuring what surrounds an address: who lives within reach, how much they spend, where competitors stand and how people travel. These guides explain the ideas in plain English, with Australian examples and public sources, so the method works whatever tool you use.
Which question do you want to understand?
- Start here
What is geomarketing?
The definition, where the ideas come from — from Reilly’s retail gravitation to Huff’s probabilities — and the data it runs on in Australia.
Example: Palmerston, NT
Read the guide - Where should I open?
How to choose a store location
Seven steps with the common mistake of each, the free public sources for doing it by hand, and the rules that come before demand.
Example: pharmacies in Adelaide
Read the guide - Who can reach my store?
What is a catchment area?
Zones, five ways to draw one, what to read inside a trade area, and why postcodes rarely match the area people actually travel from.
Examples: Newcastle and Penrith, NSW
Read the guide - Which area should I draw?
Isochrone, isodistance or radius
Four ways to draw the area around one address, four different counts of residents, and what the research says about straight lines.
Example: Fremantle, WA
Read the guide - Which one do I need?
Location intelligence, geomarketing and GIS
Three terms that overlap: what each one is, who uses it, and why the method behind a number matters more than the label.
Example: South Yarra, VIC
Read the guide - How do I compare my shortlist?
Site selection scorecard
The criteria worth measuring, how to weight them, and a scorecard of four real candidate sites under two weightings.
Example: supermarkets in Melbourne
Read the guide - Where is the market underserved?
Demand, supply and opportunity
Demand, competition, opportunity and market gap on four maps of the same town, and how to read them together.
Example: Wagga Wagga, NSW
Read the guide - Will my new store hurt my others?
Retail cannibalisation
Why stores of one network share customers, three ways to measure it, and when the overlap is worth it.
Examples: Port Macquarie, Canberra, Brisbane
Read the guide - Where do I win, and where am I unknown?
Market share and penetration
The two formulas, the data each needs, and why both fall with distance from the store.
Example: loyalty cards in Canberra
Read the guide - How much can an area spend?
Income and consumption indices
What 100 means, how the indices are built from ABS data, and why spending varies less than income.
Examples from five areas
Read the guide - Postcode, suburb or SA2?
Australian geography levels
The nine levels of Australian data, how many areas each has, which nest and which do not, and what changed in 2026.
Example: a postcode split three ways
Read the guide - What should I ask a vendor?
Choosing a geomarketing tool
Ten questions to put to any geomarketing software, from data freshness to where your files are stored, with our own answers.
Criteria, no vendor names
Read the guide - What does this term mean?
Geomarketing glossary
60 terms in plain English, from catchment area and isochrone to market gap, SA1 areas and the Huff model, each with a link to more.
A to Z
Read the guide
How are the geomarketing guides different from the solutions?
The guides explain ideas and methods, cite public sources and use a different Australian place each time. Every example comes from an analysis run on real ABS data, and the year of each figure is written next to it.
The solutions are the practical side: the same questions turned into a task in K-Stra, with screenshots, the cost in credits and a worked example. Read a guide to understand the method, a solution to apply it.
Every guide starts
from an address.
Open the map, type yours and draw its catchment. Exploring needs no account.
Open the app — free to exploreYou pay only for the analyses you run