Share of Map
Share of Map is Heady's metric for how much commercially valuable demand a cannabis company is capturing across its priority markets, categories, acquisition channels, and retention systems.
No pitch attached. You keep the plan either way.
Most marketing plans start with a service. This one starts with a number.
Ask an SEO agency what your cannabis brand needs and the answer involves SEO. Ask a paid media shop and it is ads. Nobody is lying to you. Their diagnosis and their price list are the same document.
Share of Map separates those two things. It scores where the demand in your markets actually is, how much of it you are capturing, and what closing the gap is worth, before anyone decides which service to sell you.
Scored per cell, not per channel
A cell is one product category in one local market. Flower in Hudson. Edibles in North Attleboro. Your business is not one market and one ranking. It is a thousand of these, and most of them are invisible in a channel report.
Share of Map scores every cell you depend on, then rolls them up into a single figure. A six-store chain across three metros with twelve tracked categories is roughly 1,000 cells. Every cell carries a weight based on demand and strategic value, so the roll-up stays honest.
A cell can be lost for six different reasons: no listing, a thin listing, no content, no reviews, not on the menu, or no repeat purchase. Each has a different fix, a different cost and a different payback. A single-discipline agency can only see its own reason.
The four pillars
Grid share · 40%
Not one rank. Your share of the visible slots across a geographic grid, on the three surfaces that behave like a map in this industry: the Google map pack, Weedmaps and Leafly. For CPG brands it is menu presence multiplied by your position within the menus that carry you.
Long-tail share · 35%
The laborious pillar everybody skips. Rather than fight Reddit and Weedmaps for head terms, we score the full category by market query universe plus brand and product searches, including citations in AI answers, which almost nobody is measuring in cannabis yet.
Capture rate · 25%
A jump ball is demand nobody owns yet: an open cell, a competitor delisting, a new category, a demand spike. The system detects them and scores whether you reached the top three within 45 days.
Retention factor · multiplier
Loyalty in cannabis is hard-won, so retention multiplies your score rather than averaging into it. Win every map in your footprint and leak the customers, and your effective share collapses, exactly as it should.
How it resolves
Effective Share of Map equals Position Score times Retention Factor
Position Score equals 40% grid share + 35% long-tail share + 25% capture rate
Retention Factor equals your repeat rate divided by benchmark
Methodology v1 · updated August 2026
Retention multiplies rather than averages, and that is deliberate. A brand can win every map in its footprint and still leak the customers it wins. Averaging lets strong visibility hide that. Multiplying makes the number tell the truth. If you do not keep them, you do not own the map, you rent it.
The factor is capped between 0.50 and 1.25, so one soft quarter cannot zero out a score and a loyalty standout is rewarded without running away with it.
What the number actually tells you
Illustrative example. Six stores, three metros, twelve categories.
| Pillar | Score | Weighted |
|---|---|---|
| Grid share | 38 | 15.2 |
| Long-tail share | 24 | 8.4 |
| Capture rate | 61 | 15.3 |
| Position Score | 38.9 | |
| Retention factor | 22% repeat ÷ 26% benchmark | × 0.85 |
| Effective Share of Map | 33 |
You hold 39 of the position available to you, but you keep customers at 85% of the market rate, so your effective Share of Map is 33. Fixing retention to benchmark is worth +6 points with no new visibility work at all.
That is the diagnosis a single-discipline agency structurally cannot give you. It is also why the recommendation that comes out of a Share of Map assessment is frequently not the service the brand came in asking about.
What it runs on
Connected first-party data: GA4, Google Search Console, your POS and your CRM, combined with external search and competitive data. That is what makes the diagnosis yours rather than a template, and it is why the score can see churn, which no rank tracker can.
Where the benchmark comes from
In v1, your retention factor is measured against your own trailing 12-month average, so the comparison is to your own baseline rather than to a number you cannot audit. As the dataset grows, an anonymised cross-client benchmark becomes the standard.
What is measured directly in v1
Grid share and long-tail share are measured directly. Capture rate in v1 is scored from detected opportunities across your priority cells rather than the full matrix, and the long tail is sampled on a rolling basis rather than scored in full every month. Priority cells are scored monthly.
The methodology is published rather than proprietary. You can check the arithmetic and argue with it.
What you get back
Illustrative readout. Yours will look different.
| Area | Diagnosis | Recommendation |
|---|---|---|
| Website | Strong UX, speed and conversion path | Leave it alone |
| SEO | Significant opportunity in high-intent local and category searches | Prioritize |
| CRM | Good foundation with healthy lifecycle coverage | Maintain, do not rebuild |
| Paid media | Worth testing in two priority markets | Pilot selectively |
| PR | Limited short-term upside | Deprioritize |
That is more useful than six departments each explaining why their service matters. And if the right scope gets smaller because the data says less work is needed, the invoice should get smaller too.
For a diagnosis-led engagement in practice, see the nuEra case study.
Three ways to use it
Have us run it
We execute the parts where you actually need help. Not every discipline, and not a bundled retainer just because those services exist. The scope follows the diagnosis.
Run it yourself in HeadyOS
If you already have a capable internal team, you may not need a traditional agency. HeadyOS gives teams the same operating system, data and decision framework so they can run more of the work themselves.
Take the plan
Take the recommendations and execute them yourself. No requirement to hire us afterward. That might sound like a strange sales strategy for an agency. We think it is a healthier one.
Frequently asked questions
What is Share of Map?
Share of Map is Heady's metric for how much commercially valuable demand a cannabis company is capturing across its priority markets, categories, acquisition channels, and retention systems. It is scored per cell, one product category in one local market, then rolled up into a single figure.
How is Share of Map calculated?
Effective Share of Map = Position Score × Retention Factor. Position Score is 40% grid share, 35% long-tail share and 25% capture rate. Retention Factor is your repeat rate measured against benchmark, applied as a multiplier so visibility you cannot retain does not count as share.
How is this different from local grid rank tracking?
Grid tracking measures one surface: the Google map pack. Share of Map measures the map pack, Weedmaps, Leafly and dispensary menus, adds the full long-tail query universe including citations in AI answers, then multiplies by whether you keep the customers you win, which requires POS and CRM data.
What data does a Share of Map analysis use?
Connected first-party data such as GA4, Google Search Console, POS and CRM systems, combined with external search and competitive data across your priority markets.
Do I have to hire Heady to get a Share of Map plan?
No. We build the plan for free and there is no requirement to hire us afterward. You can have us execute it, run it yourself in HeadyOS, or take the recommendations and run them internally.
Get the unbiased version
We will build you a free Share of Map plan showing where you stand, where we see the biggest opportunities, and the few things we would prioritize next.
If that means working with us, great. If your team can run it in HeadyOS, we will tell you. If part of your marketing should be left exactly as it is, we will tell you that too.
We take on a limited number of these each month.