Truck stop competitor analysis: What drive-by counts don’t tell you 

Fuel businesses know what types of trucks stop, for how long and what fuel they purchase at their own sites, but what about the visitors to the competitor across the street? Across the state? Or the competitors near a new site being evaluated for potential acquisition? New data is now available for deeper truck stop competitor analysis.

Choosing the wrong property or business strategy can lock in years of under-performance, but Altitude’s new Point-of-Interest (POI) details provide game-changing insights.

 

This provides a window into where commercial vehicles actually stop and spend. Filtering data by vehicle class, trip purpose and fuel type reveals the locations with the greatest fuel and service demand. Investors can make smarter choices based on where commercial-vehicle demand is proven, not where car counts simply look large.

What stops reveal that traditional counts can’t

Altitude POI provides first-party commercial-vehicle stop data that consumer foot-traffic and roadway-count tools cannot produce. The counts are generated from Geotab sensors measuring real travel in over six million commercial vehicles generating 100 billion daily records. This captures approximately 10% of all commercial vehicle travel in the U.S.

 

Nearly half of all commercial vehicle stops can be linked to named POI locations (the remainder include private facilities, construction sites, staging areas and other non-POI destinations). Altitude captures those by aligning GPS trace, dwell time and proximity. 

Key metrics reveal market share wins and losses

Benchmarking your operations against that of your competitors can be a time-consuming one-by-one project dependent on which competitors you can identify and collect information about. 

Instead, Altitude’s POI identifies all competitors within a defined radius, and captures stop data for every one over time. It measures your trade-area stop share by dividing the number of stops your location sees by all commercial-vehicle stops within the radius. That metric is a clear indication of location performance and trends compared to all others in the trade area. 

This detailed data answers other critical business questions, including:  

• What types of trucks stop, and for how long, at my competitor sites?
• Is my competitor capturing higher-value heavy vehicle classes, or specific vocations like tankers or long-haul fleets? 
• Is a site performance dip shared by other nearby businesses? Is it market-wide? 
• Which brands pull in the heaviest, longest-dwelling trucks? 
• Which types of trucks choose to stop at which brands? 
• How much of each type of fuel is being purchased? 
• What is the competitive stop landscape around the site I’m evaluating for acquisition?

Select any location, set your trade area radius, and Altitude’s POI surfaces every competing brand within that area — alongside your own performance metrics, side by side. Analyst-ready tables can be shared for investment decisions and stakeholder presentations. 

Deeper insights power smarter investments 

Users can simply select a site, set a study radius, and get monthly commercial vehicle stop counts at that location and every competitor in the area. Metrics include stop counts, dwell-time distribution, fuel type, vehicle class, vehicle vocation and fleet size. 

For example, consider a site acquisition analysis that compares two potential locations. Traditional roadway counts show that Site A receives 3x the pass-by heavy-duty truck traffic that Site B does. Site A looks like the winner. 

But what those metrics don’t reveal is that Site A has 20% fewer actual stops than Site B, and that number has been shrinking. Not only that, but Site A has a competitor down the road that pulls 5x more heavy-duty stops, and their percentage share is growing. 

Site B’s pass-by traffic is lower, but the total heavy-duty stop number is on par with Site A and has been growing quarter over quarter. And its closest competitor only sees half the stops of Site B. 

Knowing that, which site would you invest in now?

Fuel retailers and travel center operators have always had a view of their own performance. But now, they can evaluate potential sites or even benchmark against competitors. Altitude’s POI metrics fill in business-critical gaps that vehicle counts can’t. The details of what type of truck stops where and what fuel it purchases are a serious competitive differentiator.

Learn more about closing your competitive gap with Altitude’s Point-of-Interest metrics.