MapBusinessOnline newsletter – June 2019

MBO Discussion - Updating Territories in Map Business Online

Creating sales territory maps in Map Business Online is easy:

Import a spreadsheet with columns for County, State, & territory name (or ZIP codes, Census Tracts, etc.)
Use a polygon search tool to select a group of ZIP codes, Counties, or Census tracts
Incrementally select with your cursor one state, county or ZIP code at a time, while holding down the shift key

You can use these very same tools to update or change a territory map. Select one or more ZIP codes and click the Puzzle Piece button from the mini-toolbar presented. Up comes the dialogue to create a territory. But you will need to choose from all the options below to update or change a territory.

The first option - Create new - we all understand, but what about other options:

Add to – Simply add the selected group to a selected Territory. It's pretty easy to add to a territory.
Remove from – Remove a selected group from a selected Territory. Again, fairly straight forward.
Remove from all except – Remove the selected group from all Territories except the selected one. Preserve your special territories when necessary.
Update – Replace all territory segments with the selected group. Sometimes its easier to just replace all the segments, like starting over.
Intersecting – Intersects selected segments with territory segments and updates the territory accordingly.

Recent Feature Addition - Geocoding ZIP + 4

We recently updated Map Business Online's geocoding services. Geocoding is Map Geek talk for plotting locations on a map. With Map Business Online's most recent update came the ability to geocode by ZIP + 4 addresses. Simply include any ZIP + 4 suffix in your address list and plot the records on the map in the usual way.

Map Business Online will incorporate the additional 4 digits into your geocoding process. If the ZIP + 4 designation carries a location instruction, MBO will place it accurately.

MBO Feature of the Month - Radius Search - Find the Nearest Locations

With Map Business Online's latest software update a new option was added to the Radius search functionality and we haven't talked about it yet. A short cut checkbox was added for searching for a defined number of points within X miles of your radius center.

Once a point has been added to the map, select a radius tool and create the circle object on the map. In the first window that pops up, select your target point layer and notice the check box the appears at the bottom of the window: "[Number] nearest straight-distance locations." Insert the number of nearest points you would like to query from the center of the circle.

The results will populate the Data Window for saving and export. Results will include the distances from center to each point, sorted by distance from the center.

Family Fun with Map Business Online

This week I showed my eight-year-old nephew Map Business Online. He blew me away with his ability to quickly name states and countries. Here are several map quiz approaches that worked well:

Using the Streets map background and the state layer (set to opaque) turn off auto labels. Point to blank states and a ask for identification
Pull up the Satellite background map. Point to key countries and ask for identification
Still with satellite imagery ask for continent and large area identification - like the Sahara Desert

I was impressed with how well he identified tough geo-objects such as the Caspian Sea, and Crete. Go Ollie! And go Ollie's teachers!

Let us Build Some Market Analysis for You!

Map Business Online offers an array of tools designed to expose new markets for business mapping users. Those tools include:

A comprehensive and growing library of Demographic Data categories
Calculated Data Columns to let you combine and create formulas with demographic data
The Market Analysis tools for point array distance calculations and other data append operations
The More Data analysis management tool mentioned above

Not everyone or every company has time to conduct such detailed analysis. Consider hiring the Map Business Online custom mapping team to review your marketing analysis requirements. References are available upon request, under a mutual NDA. Contact us!