Two questions get answered about any place: who lives there and who already sells there.

The people half comes from the Census — real household counts, sorted into segments by how built-up the area is, what households earn, and what stage of life they are in.

The business half comes from the federal employment file — every storefront, shop and office, counted by trade.

Then it gives you one call: go after this market, narrow it down first, or leave it alone.

A segment is a kind of household. Not a person — a household.

Three things put a household in one: how built-up its area is, roughly what it earns, and whether it has kids at home, is younger with none, or is older.

Those three, across five kinds of place, make a grid of sixty possible kinds. A market only ever has some of them. The count you see is how many of the sixty actually show up here, and how many households sit in each.

Why it matters: one message cannot talk to everybody. Segments tell you how many different conversations this market actually needs.

Every line is a kind of work, and the number is how many people here do it. This is a head count of working people, not of households.

The index beside it compares this market to the whole country. One hundred means this market has that trade in exactly the national proportion. A hundred and eighty means nearly twice the national share.

Why it matters: the business list tells you which trades have a front door here. This tells you what the people actually do — who you would be talking to, what they earn it doing, and which trades this place is unusually full of.

All of it is counted by the Census. Nothing on this list is modeled.

These come from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Every year it asks hundreds of thousands of Americans how they live — whether they exercise, smoke, drink, sleep, see a dentist, feel lonely, run short on food — and works out the share for every ZIP code and neighborhood in the country.

The index compares this market to the whole country. One hundred is the national share. A hundred and thirty means thirty percent more people here do it than across America.

Why it matters: a town that skips exercise is a gym's market. A town that sees the dentist is a dentist's market. A lonely town wants a place to belong. This is how people here actually live, measured for this place, not guessed from the kind of household.

A target is several kinds of household you have decided to reach as one group. Pick them, name the group, save it, and it works in any market you run.

The households are counted by the Census. The share is how much of this market your target covers.

The score beside each behavior is out of a national average of one hundred. One hundred and forty means your target is forty percent more likely than the average American household to do it. The small line under it compares the target to this market as a whole, which is the number that tells you whether aiming narrow beats aiming broad.

The scores are modeled from how built-up, how well-off and what stage of life each kind is. The household counts are not modeled.

See where the target lives on the Map tab: it is at the top of the list there.

Each line is a trade, and the number is how many separate locations carry it. A chain with four stores counts four times, because four stores is four front doors.

Tap a line to break it down another notch — a whole sector opens into the trades inside it, and those open again, down to the finest level the government publishes.

Why it matters: a crowded trade means competition you have to beat. A thin one means either an opening or a reason nobody bothers. The count does not tell you which — it tells you where to go look.

Households get sorted by where they live, what they earn and their stage of life. Businesses get sorted by what they do and how big they are. Nobody sells a neat sixty-kinds chart for businesses, so this is the honest version: each trade split four ways by headcount.

Tiny is one to four people. Small is five to nineteen. Established is twenty to ninety-nine. Big is a hundred or more.

Why it matters: a tiny shop buys like a household and the owner decides on the spot. A big one has a buyer, a budget and a calendar. Same trade, two different sales.

Cars per home comes from the Census, for every county in America. It counts vehicles a household has, not which brand.

Brands come straight off a state's registration records, which are a full count, not a survey. Washington posts every electric car by make and model, and every vehicle by type. Most states, Idaho included, do not post brands at all.

Nobody else in this report is asked. These numbers are counted.

Two things are multiplied together. The households in each kind are real, counted by the Census. The spending per household is the federal Consumer Expenditure Survey — a real measurement, but a national average for households at that income.

So the dollars are an estimate of the pool, not a measurement of this town. It says how much money households like these normally put into a category in a year. It does not say how much of it stays local.

Per door is that pool divided by the businesses here in those trades. A big pool behind few doors is an opening. A small pool behind many doors is a knife fight.

Nobody publishes local spending by category for free. Anyone selling you that number is selling you a model too — this one just shows its work.

Every shape is a real census tract — a neighborhood the government already counts, usually a few thousand households.

The darker a tract, the more of the kind you picked lives there. It is a share, not a headcount: a small tract that is mostly that kind still reads dark.

Grey tracts are too thin to color. Below a few hundred households the share swings wildly on a handful of families, so the map greys them out rather than inventing a shade.

Why it matters: this is the difference between knowing your people exist and knowing which streets to spend on. Tap a tract to see its numbers.

Every customer is placed by the neighborhood they live in, not by anything about them personally. The government publishes what each neighborhood looks like; we look yours up and read it back.

The index is the number that matters. One hundred means that kind of household buys from you at exactly the rate they exist in your market. Two hundred means you are twice as strong with them as the market would predict. Fifty means you are half as strong.

High index, small count: a pocket you are quietly winning. Low index, big count: the biggest hole in your business, and usually the cheapest thing to fix.

This is a read on the neighborhood, not on the person. It says your customers come from places that look like this — it does not say what any one household earns.

TARGET — the households here bunch up into a few kinds. One campaign can reach a lot of them at once. Spend here.

REFINE — there is something, but not enough to swing at the whole market. Pick a slice and aim at that.

SCATTER — the households are spread thin across many kinds. A broad campaign wastes most of its money. Go narrow, or go somewhere else.

The call comes out of two readers that cannot see each other: one counts the real households, the other reads the likely behavior. When they agree, confidence goes up. When they disagree, it goes down and the tool says so instead of pretending.