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Using GO To Drive Site Selection For Gas Stations

Site selection is the most fundamental aspect of a new gas station.

While the best advice on design, build, operation and safety are often available to the new owner, there is very little ground truth in how the actual gas demand may be.

This is a challenge not just for pump owners but also for financial analysts and energy traders tracking gas demand at the granular level of individual gas stations.

While the different station owners have access to their own business numbers and pump volumes, they wouldn’t know how competitors are doing.

With Orbital Insight’s GO, that worry may be a thing of the past. The geospatial platform lets customers track activity in their specified area of interest (AOI) during a monitoring period with past, present, and ongoing data creation. Using geospatial-powered data to create heat maps of businesses and tracking foot-traffic activity via anonymized pings from devices in any AOI, GO can help tell at a glance which gas stations are capturing market share, and from where.

In this image from our GO platform, we marked a set of gas stations in Hanford and Lemoore, California. Once selected, a user can specify exactly what it is they would like to monitor there, such as cellphone “pings”, cars, changes in structural usage, etc. From this, we can derive useful information using metadata such as home and work locations, dwell time, and micro-locations within the AOI to scale our understanding of downstream demand to the trade areas of thousands of gas stations.

energy marketing trade area

In the next visual below, we see how Chevron’s Lacey Blvd station has completely cannibalized the business of the Chevron pump in neighboring Hanford. You’ll see that the brown trade area completely envelops its peer, while attracting additional customers both north and south of Chevron Hanford. In marketing, cannibalization refers to a reduction in sales volume, revenue or market share of one product from the introduction of a new product or similar business by the same producer.

This visual also shows the benefits for gas stations that are farther away from rivals, such as the Sinclair outlet in Lemoore.

energy marketing trade area central california

Gas station owners, research houses and asset managers need to have more insight into tracking regional and national gas demand levels.

GO gives them the ability to isolate stations that are of interest to them, including their own and those of their competitors, and measure foot traffic per gas station to understand how different gas stations perform over time. Operators now have access to valuable trade area data through GO, helping them select sites that better distribute their retail footprint and expand to locations that are poorly served by existing operations.

On a greater scale, our data helps contextualize the relationship of their competition’s site selection, advertising and pricing decisions for their own gas stations.

When paired with Orbital Insight’s suite of geospatial capabilities, GO users are able to track oil storage, the flow of inventories, refinery outages, and downstream demand to illuminate the first to last mile of the supply chain with objective, transparent, and timely data.


For more information on how to use Orbital Insight GO to illuminate the entire energy supply chain, please reach out to: support@orbitalinsight.com