SimplyAnalytics: New Resource Offers Powerful Data for Business & Research
Posted on January 29, 2025 at 7:00 am
By Stacey Goddard
Spokane County Library District (SCLD) has a powerful new digital resource you can access through the Digital Library, called SimplyAnalytics. It can provide powerful information for business and project research.
With an in-district SCLD library card, you can use SimplyAnalytics while visiting any of our ten libraries and from home, with an internet connection.
Resource Overview
SimplyAnalytics is a mapping, analytics, and data visualization application that you can access on the web. You can create interactive maps, charts, and reports using 200,000+ data variables, so it offers a lot of flexibility and a powerful amount of data.
If you have research or business-related questions, it offers premium demographic, business, health, and marketing data, making it easy to find and generate the data you need.
SimplyAnalytics is a versatile tool for research and analysis and provides you with powerful data visualization. Here are some of those data types:
- Demographic: Population, age, gender, race, education, language, family type, housing, and more
- Economic: Income, poverty, employment, occupation, housing values, rent, and more
- Health: Diseases, diagnoses, doctor visits, procedures, health status, unhealthy behaviors, and more
- Business: Create maps and reports of more than 25 million businesses, with employee count, total revenue and more
- Marketing: Market segments, life stages, technology use, financial products, retail sales, and more
- Consumer Spending: Food, housing, clothing, auto, entertainment, health, technology, media, travel, and more
- Historical: Decennial census for 1980, 1990, 2000, and 2010, as well as tons of data from 2007 to now
- Crosstab: Create custom crosstab tables from over 100,000 consumer behavior data variables
- Your Data: Import your research, sales, marketing, customer, or patron data into SimplyAnalytics
Features
To help your research and analysis, SimplyAnalytics gives you a wide variety of formats to organize and see the data. Here are some of those features.
Interactive Maps
Create interactive maps using 200,000+ data variables. View data by state, county, ZIP code, census tract, or block group and easily customize every aspect of your map.
Powerful Charts
Create bar charts, histograms, and scatter plots with just a few clicks.
Ranking Tables
Create ranking tables that show data such as the top 100 wealthiest ZIP codes in your state or the Census Tracts in your city identifying the most college-educated residents.
Crosstab Tables
Create informative crosstab tables using several of our consumer behavior survey datasets. For example, you can explore the demographic characteristics of specific website visitors or who is most likely to purchase different brands of cars.
Related Data Tables
Add one data variable to this type of report and SimplyAnalytics will automatically add all of the related data for you. For example, if you add “Percent of Households with Income $50,000 to $74,999,” the report will also show all of the other income ranges as well.
Advanced Data Filters
Identify your target areas in maps and reports using powerful location filters and queries. Locations that do not match your criteria are removed, leaving you with a clear and concise view of your matching locations.
Detailed Reports
SimplyAnalytics can generate seven different types of detailed, custom tabular reports for one or many locations. For example, view a “quick report” with dozens of demographic variables for your census tract and county, or create a ring study illustrating the characteristics of the 1-, 3-, and 5-mile radius surrounding your target location.
Import Your Data
Import your academic, business, or marketing data into SimplyAnalytics and use it alongside all of the other data.
Export Everything
Reports and data can be exported as Excel, CSV, or DBF files. You can also export high-resolution images as PDFs, SVGs, JPEGs, or PNGs and place them into documents, presentations, and websites. Advanced users can export shapefiles for use in desktop GIS (Geographic Information System) software.
Note: The overview and features information was provided by the SimplyAnalytics website.
Basic Tutorial for SimplyAnalytics
To get started, click Digital Library on the main navigation of our website. I usually use the Categories drop-down menu and select Business from the options to pull up all of the business resources. You’ll then see SimplyAnalytics further down on the web page (resources are sorted alphabetically). Click on it to go to the SimplyAnalytics login page (figure 1).
Note: If you’re accessing SimplyAnalytics from home, you’ll be asked to enter your library card number and PIN before going to the login page.
If you plan to use SimplyAnalytics for multiple projects, I encourage you to create an account. That way, SimplyAnalytics can save your preferences and past searches, and you won’t have to start from scratch every time.
You’re always welcome to choose the “Sign in as a guest” option, but know that your searches and preferences won’t be saved.
For this tutorial, we are going to follow along on a project that I’m conducting specifically to show you some of the ways you can use this resource. Once logged in, we’re taken to the project screen (figure 2).
At the top under Current Project, it says, “New Project 5.” I’ve previously done four different searches, so it automatically named this project. To rename a project, you can click on the text and type in your preferred name.
For this project, I am looking up coffee shops in a specific ZIP code (99206), and those are the results we’re seeing.
You can start a new project at any time. Let’s do that now.
For this project, I’d like to look up some housing information. When I click on “New Project” at the top of the screen, it asks me to enter one or more locations that I want to analyze. For this example, I’m again going to use the same ZIP code (99206) and click on the result (figure 3).
Note that if you search for places, such as cities and counties, you’ll likely get more results. For example, when I type “Spokane” in the search box, I get several results (figure 4).
If I wanted to look at all the coffee shops in Spokane Valley, for example, I could select that location from the list and continue my project from there.
Back to my housing example in the 99206 ZIP code…
Once I click “next” (figure 3), SimplyAnalytics asks me to choose at least one variable from a pre-set list, so that initial reports and maps can be generated and “seeded” (aka filled in) with data (figure 5).
After you’ve done a few searches like I have, SimplyAnalytics will probably leave your previous choices selected, like it did for me (figure 5).
For this new project, I’m going to deselect the Educational Attainment and Median Household Income boxes and select the three boxes at the bottom that relate to housing. With the variables I want selected, I click the “Create project” button (figure 6).
Note that SimplyAnalytics does allow you to create a new project without choosing any initial “seed” variables. Because this resource accesses so much information that’s pulled from so many sources, I strongly recommend selecting at least one variable to start any search or project so that you aren’t buried in data.
You can always add and remove variables as you go.
Once my project is created, SimplyAnalytics pulls the data and presents it in the main viewing area. The first view I get for this new project is a map view (figure 7). That was also the view I was using for my last search and project.
To switch views, there are different options on the right side of the screen.
Selecting a Comparison Table lets me see the number of housing units (based on 2024 data) in the 99206 ZIP code as well as the percentage that are owner occupied versus renter occupied (figure 8). This type of table also compares the 99206 data with data from the entire USA.
At this point, I could add additional locations for more comparison if I wanted to, such as all of Spokane County and Washington State (figure 9).
SimplyAnalytics also lets you move the columns in the order you prefer. I moved the USA data column to the far-right side (figure 9).
Now that I have locations and variables identified, I can dig deeper into the data. To do that, I switch from the Locations button, found in the top-left corner, to the Data button (figure 10).
SimplyAnalytics allows you to browse over 20 categories, including population, consumer behavior, health information, and more. For my search, though, I select Housing as the data category (figure 10).
This might be a good place to mention that, because SimplyAnalytics is such a powerful and robust tool, you can easily feel like you’ve fallen down a rabbit hole of data.
In this example, when I selected Housing, I was given even more search variables to choose from!
As you can see from figure 11, I can choose data about how long people have been in their dwellings (Housing Tenure) or how much their homes cost (Housing Values) by simply checking those boxes to add those variables.
I could also add additional variables from the other categories at any point, too.
So, if I decided I wanted to see the income levels for homeowners and renters, I could check the box next to Income to include that data. You, see? It can become a rabbit-hole adventure through the data, for sure!
Back to my housing search… Once I select Housing Tenure, even more variables are available to view on the right side of the page. For this example, I selected the five options under the general Housing Tenure section (figure 12).
After making all my variable selections, I switch back to Locations (top-left corner) to see the results. In addition to the percentages of owners versus renters, this updated search now shows me the numbers of both homeowners and renters in the 99206 ZIP code (figure 13).
And because I added Spokane County and Washington State to my project, I can see how ZIP code 99206 compares to those two larger areas. The percentages for owners and renters are pretty similar in all three geographic locations, which is interesting.
Although my example focused on one fact relating to housing, I hope you can see the potential SimplyAnalytics has to harness data for you, providing a way for you to compare and visualize information on a local, regional, state, and even national level.
Get Assistance
The above example is just one of the ways you can use SimplyAnalytics to access a wide variety of data to research information for your business, grant application, school project, or even just personal curiosity.
Check out this news post directly from SimplyAnalytics showing how you might use the Location Query Report for your data. They end up combining six variables to find 16 ZIP codes across the country that meet their criteria.
You can also find information on SimplyAnalytics’ news site about other features, such as crosstab reports, histograms, scatterplots, and more.
If you’re not sure where to start for your project or if you are stuck in the middle of your search, library staff can help! Schedule a Book-a-Librarian appointment to get one-on-one help and learn more about how to use SimplyAnalytics to find the information you need.
Stacey Goddard loves being able to work with small business owners and people looking to change careers as part of her job as a Public Services Manager for Spokane County Library District. She’s also a fan of helping folks increase their financial literacy, especially after her own ill-advised spending decisions in her 20s and 30s! Outside of work, Stacey enjoys buying cookbooks to browse and probably never use, binge-watching fashion competition shows, and planning her next vacation to the Oregon Coast.
