How to read this report

Directional, not definitive. This guide describes how each metric is built so you can take it as a starting point for further research, not a final verdict.

This page documents the data and methods behind the rankings, demographics and overlays in the LRC report. It applies to both the customer-facing Discovery report and the internal grid map.

What this report is for

A snapshot of how a business currently shows up in Google's local results across a chosen area, paired with context about the people, properties and competitors around it. We use it to:

• Surface gaps between where a business is visible and where its customers actually live.
• Compare a business's local pack ranking against direct competitors at the exact points a searcher would stand.
• Anchor a conversation in real Census, valuation and search data — not anecdote.

We do not use it to:

• Predict revenue impact of a campaign — rankings move daily; this is a single point in time.
• Replace a full SEO or paid-media audit — it's a complement, not a substitute.
• Make absolute claims about an area's economy — the demographic layers are derived from public Census 2022 data and are aggregated, not exhaustive.

Every figure on the report is directional. Use it to choose what to investigate next.

How rankings are measured

We query Google's local pack at a grid of points around the target business. Each pin on the grid is a hypothetical searcher's location. The pin's colour shows where the target business would rank in Google's local pack if a searcher stood at that exact point, at the time of the check.

The yellow halo marks the target business's own GBP location — that's the address being analysed, not a searcher pin. Grid pins are scattered around it.

Source: SerpAPI calls to Google's local-pack endpoint, one per grid point per keyword. Grid spacing and zoom are auto-derived from the radius so dense urban categories stay legible.

Caveats:

• Rankings change constantly. A re-run a day later will differ — usually by 1–3 positions, sometimes more.
• We capture the local pack as Google would show a signed-out, neutral searcher. Personalised results (logged-in users, search history) will differ.
• A grid pin tells you what a searcher in that spot would see. It does not tell you anything about the business's own address quality.

Purchasing Power index

The "Purchasing Power" overlay is our composite metric, derived from CSO Census 2022 small-area statistics. It is not an official index.

How it's built

Each Census small area gets a score from 0–71, computed as a weighted average of five percentage indicators:

Formula: score = Σ(component × weight) / Σ(weights of non-null components)

How to read the bands

The national median is 39.55, P25 is 31, P75 is 45.

What it isn't

• Not Pobal's index. Pobal's HP Deprivation Index is the official credentialled measure. We hold it on file (joined at Electoral Division level — coarser than small areas) and may surface it as a cross-check, but the map's affluence overlay is our composite.
• Not an income measure. It correlates with income but is built from social class, education, housing tenure and car ownership — not earnings.
• Not a guarantee of behaviour. A "very affluent" small area still contains price-sensitive buyers and vice versa. Use it to weight outreach, not exclude.

Demographics layer

The demographics tab aggregates CSO Census 2022 fields across the small areas inside the report's coverage:

• Home heating — share of households on gas, oil, electric or solid fuel
• Age bands — 0–4, 5–12, 13–17, 18–24, 25–44, 45–64, 65+
• Family composition — share of families with children
• Car ownership — households with no car, one car, two or more cars
• Work-from-home share — proportion of workers reporting WFH at the time of the Census

Source: CSO SAPS 2022 (Small Area Population Statistics), 18,919 small areas nationally.

Caveats:

• Census is a once-per-five-year snapshot. Next refresh is the 2027 Census.
• Small areas are aggregated to ~50–200 households each. They tell you about the neighbourhood, not individual addresses.
• Some fields are sparse for low-population areas — we suppress where the sample is too small.
• The national area map exposes a few fields the LRC report doesn't (and vice versa). Both pull from the same CSO source; the difference is which fields each surface chooses to render.

Commercial properties layer

The commercial layer plots non-residential properties from the Tailte Éireann valuation register, classified by use:

• Retail — shops, retail warehouses
• Office
• Industrial
• Hospitality — pubs, restaurants, hotels, guesthouses
• Other — utilities, leisure, health, miscellaneous

Each layer has its own legend on the map showing the colours used; the LRC report and the national area map use slightly different palettes for the same categories, but the underlying classification is identical.

Source: Tailte Éireann (Valuation Office), 153K properties across 31 Local Authorities. Pulled per-LA via the Tailte open-data API and concatenated.

Caveats:

• Coverage is national but revaluation is rolling — some LAs were last revalued years ago, so addresses or use classes may be slightly stale.
• ~2K properties are missing nationally due to address-formatting issues at load time (98.7% loaded).
• "Hospitality" is not fine-grained — it groups pubs, restaurants, hotels and guesthouses together.

Online reach (Facebook / Instagram)

When shown, the FB/IG audience figure is the online-reachable population Meta estimates for ad targeting in the chosen area.

Source: Meta Marketing API, queried live.

Caveats:

• Meta's number is Meta's — it reflects monthly-active accounts inside the radius, not total population.
• Targeting estimates are bands, not exact counts. Treat as order-of-magnitude.
• Excludes anyone not on Meta's platforms (Facebook, Instagram).

Competitors panel

The competitors list shows other businesses ranking in the same local pack searches. We pull each one's GBP profile (name, address, primary category, website if listed) and present them next to the target.

Source: SerpAPI's local-pack response for each grid point.

Caveats:

• A competitor only appears if Google ranked them in the top 20 for at least one of our keyword × point combinations.
• Categories shown are Google's primary category for each business — they may have additional categories on their GBP we don't display.
• We don't infer pricing, ad spend, or conversion rates for competitors. Anything beyond GBP-published facts is out of scope.

Keyword volumes

Where shown, monthly search volume can come from two places depending on what's available for the keyword:

• Google Ads Keyword Planner — Google's own search-volume tool, accessed via a Manager account. National (Republic of Ireland) figures by default; county-level figures where the keyword has enough volume to disaggregate.
• Third-party keyword tool (Ahrefs) — used as a backstop for keywords Keyword Planner doesn't return, and for cross-checks.

Caveats:

• "National" means a search anywhere in Ireland, not specifically inside the report's radius.
• Volumes are estimates, often banded (e.g. 100–500). Order-of-magnitude only.
• Keyword Planner skews towards advertiser-relevant keywords — long-tail and brand-modified phrases are sometimes under-reported.
• The two sources can disagree by a factor of 2–3× for the same keyword. We show whichever has data; if both have data we show Keyword Planner.

Housing growth (new builds)

Where the report or national map shows construction activity, the figures come from two CSO datasets:

• New Dwelling Completions (NDQ07) — homes built and ready for occupation. Reported per Eircode routing key (3-character, e.g. "X91" = Waterford). Updated quarterly by the CSO with a ~2-month lag. Used 2023–2025 as the rolling growth window.
• Commencement Notices (HSM14) — projects formally started. Reported per Local Authority. Updated monthly by the Department of Housing via the CSO. Used 2023–2025.

Caveats:

• Completions ≠ commencements. A commencement signals intent; a completion is a built home. Both lag — a commencement notice today shows up as a completion 12–24 months later.
• Eircode mapping covers 139 routing keys → 26 counties. ~99.8% of completions map cleanly; 193 are in Eircodes outside our lookup.
• Dublin sub-counties (Fingal, South Dublin, Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, Dublin City) all roll up to "Dublin" in CSO Eircode data. The map's county selector splits them, but the growth figure is the combined Dublin total. Same caveat for Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford city/county pairs.

Companies (CRO)

Where shown, B2B context — "X active companies in this county, Y new in the last 12 months" — comes from the Companies Registration Office bulk dataset.

Source: CRO Open Data (opendata.cro.ie), aggregated to county + NACE sector + registration year.

Caveats:

• Address on file is the registered address, not the trading address. We aggregate to county level so "1,000 companies at one accountancy firm" doesn't distort the picture.
• Dormant companies are not stripped — registration ≠ active trading.
• NACE codes are 2-digit EU classification (e.g. 56 = Food & Beverage). Sector splits are coarse.

Sports clubs (national map only)

The national area map plots community sports clubs by code (GAA, Soccer/FAI, Rugby/IRFU, Golf, other) with dot size scaled to membership.

Source: Sport Ireland — GetIrelandActive directory.

Caveats:

• Membership figures are self-reported by clubs to Sport Ireland; some clubs return "no website" and these are flagged separately on the legend.
• The split into five buckets (GAA family / Soccer / Rugby / Golf / Other) is ours — it groups several Sport Ireland sub-codes into the categories most useful for B2B targeting.
• This layer is on the national map only; the LRC report doesn't currently surface it.

Data freshness

A timestamp on the report cover shows when it was generated. Anything that says "live" or "snapshot" was captured then; anything from a static source is the latest publicly available version.

Privacy, cookies and consent

When you open this report we ask for cookie consent before any analytics fire.

If you click Allow:

• A random visitor identifier is generated and stored in your browser's local storage (no name, no email, no IP captured).
• We log which sections you open and how long you spend, so we can see whether the report is useful and improve it.

If you click Reject:

• No analytics fire. No identifier is stored. No events are sent.
• The only thing we save is your "no" so we don't ask again for 12 months.

If you don't choose:

• The banner stays until you do. Nothing fires in the meantime.

The "Ask FCR to investigate" button has its own consent step. Each time you open the panel the consent box is reset to unchecked — GDPR requires fresh, per-action consent. Submitting without ticking it will not send your message.

Full policy: fcrmedia.com/privacy-policy.

Data sources & public availability

Every external dataset on this report is publicly available and can be downloaded by anyone from the publisher's own site. We aggregate, geocode and present the data — we don't hold anything proprietary or scraped from a paywalled source. The table below points at each publisher's open-data page so you can verify or download for yourself.

National catalog: all Irish public-sector datasets above are also indexed on data.gov.ie, Ireland's national open-data portal. The actual download lives at each publisher's own portal (the URLs in the table); data.gov.ie is the catalog that points to them.

FCR-derived metrics

Some figures on this report are composites we calculate from the public sources above. They are our metrics, not the publisher's:

Attribution we use on the report

Wherever we surface a number from one of the sources above, the source is credited inline. Standard wording:

• Source: CSO Census 2022 — for any small-area demographic figure
• Source: Pobal HP Deprivation Index 2022 — wherever Pobal scores appear
• Source: Tailte Éireann (Valuation Office) — for commercial property layer
• Source: CRO Open Data — for company counts
• Source: Google Ads / Source: Ahrefs — for keyword volumes
• Source: Meta — for online audience reach
• Local pack data via SerpAPI / Google — for ranking grids
• Source: Sport Ireland GetIrelandActive — for sports-club layer on the national map

If anything in your report cites a number without a source, tell us — that's a gap, not a feature.

What this report does not include

• Real-time conversion data from the business's website or call tracking
• Live ad spend or paid-media performance for competitors
• Subjective judgements about a business's quality, service or value
• Predictions of campaign ROI

Those questions are answered by other reports we run — ask your account manager.

Questions about a specific number on the report? Use the "Ask FCR to investigate" button to send us the area you're looking at, with optional notes. We'll come back to you with context.