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To figure that out population growth is available from census.gov.  I have spent an easy 500 hours over the years learning about geo coding from FIPs codes to census tracts and all the weird nuances within state and local demographic data.  I recall trying to mirror the way Mazda tracks service retention.  It was so hard to figure out, I had to convert each of our customer's address to their census tract (AORs in dealer agreements are based on census tracts not zip codes) I used Texas A&Ms free tool http://geoservices.tamu.edu/Services/Geocode/.  Mazda wouldn't tell us who was in the AOR that we had to keep vs those that weren't included in the calculation.  I was able to target those in our AOR with marketing and calls and essentially beat the flaw in the system.  I was pretty proud, even though not a single person knew what I did.  I did try to explain to the Mazda reps....

Back on your question, although population growth is a factor to a market there is a statistical tool to determine how much of a factor it is.  The process to determine a factor's impact on a variable is called a regression analysis.  The dependent variable in this case is the number of users that meet an engagement condition (Qweb).  The independent variables are the variables we want to test.  This could be inventory count, vdp count as well as population growth rates.  My gut and experience with these tell me population growth rates would be lower on the regression analysis versus other metrics that are closer to the dependent variable.

We do this at driven data to understand what truly impacts our data specifically in predictions.  Here is an example:

This is a regression analysis of the effect weather has on showroom traffic (full study here).  You will see we also included weekday.  As you can see weekday has over double the impact on showroom traffic than any other independent variable.  Regression analysis is a very simple yet powerful way to focus on the things that truly matter.