>> Welcome back to the "Census Business Builder."
The first video provided a brief overview
of the key features of the tool.
This video will provide six key tips and tricks on how
to use this tool, and get the most out of it.
Tip one: Start broad and then drill down.
Since the customers and competitors
of a business often are from an entire county
or multiple counties instead of just a single city, zip code
or neighborhood, it's recommended that you start
by browsing the data for an entire county.
Then, you can drill down to the local areas
to see the distribution of your customers
and competitors in each local area.
Tip two: There's no business data
by zip code or neighborhood.
This tip is related to tip one.
To protect the privacy of individual businesses
and ensure the quality of the data,
the Census Bureau suppresses the data
when there are very few companies
in a given industry and area.
Since these suppressions would result
in information only being shown for the larger cities,
the "other businesses like mine"
data variables are not available at the zip code
and neighborhoods levels.
These variables are always shown lined through in the menus.
Tip three: Number of establishments is always shown.
This tip is related to tip two.
While the data on number of employees, annual payroll
and sales of businesses are sometimes suppressed
to protect the privacy of individual companies.
The number of business locations or establishments never is,
as it is considered public knowledge.
So when you are browsing the data for other businesses
like mine, it's recommended that you first browse the data
on establishments, if the displayed values are low.
It's very likely that the other variables will be withheld.
Tip four: Clear your filters before navigating backup.
Since it is very easy to define a filter that displays areas
at one level of geography like zip codes, but that results
in no areas that qualify at a higher level of geography
like a county, it's recommended
that you clear your filters first, before navigating
from a local area backup to a broader area.
Tip five: Check the data release schedule.
While the information about my customers is released
at one time, so information is available for every location,
some of the information about other businesses
like mine are released on a flow basis, so data may not
yet be available for every business and location.
When the data are not yet available,
the whole map will be shown grayed out.
Clicking on the release schedule link
in the map variables menu lets you see what data has been
released by type of business and location,
and if your data is not yet available,
you can see when it will be.
Tip six: Filter is just for geographies, not data.
While the variables that appear in the map variables
and the filter menus are exactly the same,
how they each work is quite different.
For example, selecting total population
from the map variables menu presents this variable
in the map.
If you then choose median household income
from the filter menu and set the minimum value to $200,000,
the map will repaint to only show those geographic areas
with median household income greater than $200,000.
The population data shown is still just the total population,
not the population in that area that are in households
with household income greater than $200,000.
Thank you for your interest in the "Census Business Builder."
Please view the accompanying navigation, filtering
and report videos that explain these detailed features
of the tool.
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