Finding the perfect spot can sometimes be a challenge
I need a dog-friendly place that is quiet enough to read and that isn't too crowded for a family-sized blanket. As you know, the more criteria you have, the more challenging it is to find a great fit for your needs. It's the same principle when finding the next great spot for your business! If you're thinking about opening up a new branch, looking for the next place to sell your product, or just want to analyze your current locations - well, we can help you with that.
At CleverMaps, we've traditionally used our proprietary Retail Exposure Index dataset to evaluate location potential. Recently, however, we've taken this a step further with Business Attractiveness.
It works on the same principle but goes beyond a simple index. By modeling mobility patterns, it estimates the number of visitors a location attracts on a daily basis, providing a more intuitive view of a site's performance and potential.
How exactly can the Retail Exposure Index help my business?
CleverMaps' Retail Exposure Index can help you find the perfect place where your business will get the exposure that it needs. Retail Exposure Index is the perfect tool to help you decide where to expand your business. It's a combination of many different location-based factors that rates the desirability of a location.
In other words, it helps you to understand the importance of any place based on parameters such as the presence of important Points of Interest (banks/ATMs, administration facilities, shopping centres, transportation hubs, schools, hospitals, and healthcare providers), dining and leisure opportunities, traffic density, and even the movement of people. If this sounds overwhelming to you, don't worry!
We keep the perfect list of location factors, and afterwards, you'll have an easy-to-read heat- and dot-map showing you the ideal places for you to expand. Afterwards, adjustments to the weight (i.e. importance) of each location parameter can be made to further narrow down your ideal location.
Let's see in action how to find a location for a new branch
Some of us are visual learners, so let us show you how this works in practice. Let's say that a big bank, which operates across the entire Czech Republic, is looking to add a new branch. It looks at a map of the Exposure Index across the Czech Republic, and (unsurprisingly!) it seems that Prague is showing up as a hotspot.
As you can see, CleverMaps can also display your existing branches, which are shown here as green and orange markers. Based on that, you can find the optimal location for your new branch.
OK, so we've confirmed that Prague is the city where we want to open a new branch. We've checked the exposure, and we see that the city can support another branch. Now we are doing a more targeted search within Prague, looking for which parts of the city offer the highest exposure index. As we increase the granularity of the search, we find what looks to be an ideal location for a new branch. This spot looks promising...
…but maybe we can do better. Let's adjust some of the filters to make sure there isn't any better location.
And all of this can even be done inside the dashboard because the categories are fully interactive!
The future of the Retail Exposure Index is Business Attractiveness
So this is how our Retail Exposure Index has worked until now. However, from 2026, an upgrade is coming to the Retail Exposure Index – Business Attractiveness.
As you may have noticed, the Retail Exposure Index measured how exposed a location is based on POIs. It was a number showing whether a place was more or less exposed compared to others.
But what if you could measure how exposed a location is using the estimated number of visitors during the day, instead of a plain index value? That is now possible.
Check out our Business Attractiveness dataset and see how you can measure it.
The best way to learn is to practice
Have some hands-on experience. Let us know, and we will show you how the Retail Exposure Index and Business Attractiveness work in practice during our 30-minute demo call.
Read more about measuring the attractiveness of a business location HERE.
Related use case: Site selection with CleverMaps