Last week I presented a webinar focusing on Map Business Online Pro for users who were interested in our recently released Market Analysis tool. The above video is a recording of the webinar. Please review the webinar covering our latest Business Mapping Software release.
Webinar presenting is a bit like experiencing an ever-shifting roller coaster ride. You rely on the physical structure to hold and the technology to work, and you never know where you’ll end up. It could be you’ll end up in a heap on the ground – bruised, bleeding or worse.
People who present webinars know exactly what I mean.
Webinar presenting combines the abject terror of public speaking, with the unknowing anxiety of using brand new software when you are eighty-five years old and have a measure of dementia. And presenting adds a dash of strapping in for a ride on a Saturn Five moon rocket. You just never know how far the technology will take you, this time…
Sometimes I wake up at night from a nightmare where I’m presenting to fifty people and somebody just texted me that they can’t see my screen. And my laptop just turned into a vintage Etch-a-sketch.
Webinar Nightmares
At any rate, despite my anxiety, this webinar went pretty well. During the weeks leading up to the webinar, I spent a lot of time with Map Business Online Pro, exploring the tool and trying various application examples. Here are some tips I learned:
Keep Your Driving Time Analysis Local – Driving time analysis with specific time or day and week options turned on is a machine intense analysis. It takes traffic into consideration on top of the road networks. And keep in mind, that road network analysis is looking at all possible roads from a set of multiple points to, potentially, another set of multiple points. That is going to take some time, and if you run it across the whole country, well, you might want to take a nap. We’ll be adding some cautionary software stops to help users think through their queries. We believe that most of our users’ time-based analysis should be focused locally anyway. If you require multiple point drive times for nationwide location datasets – talk to us.
Importing One Spreadsheet with Origin and Destination Data – Make sure your header data specifically describes the address components. Something like this:
|
Origin Address |
Origin City | Origin State | Origin ZIP | Destination Address | Destination City | Destination State |
Destination ZIP |
| 10 We St | Crazy | IL | 60609 | 10 Salem Rd | Pendleton | MA | 01542 |
Map Business Online’s geocoding process needs to see those guiding address descriptors or headers to plot dual addresses effectively. You’ll be able to manually override the addressing as usual. All I’m saying is, do yourself a favor and be organized for origin and destination analysis. It is a complex analysis. Don’t take it lightly.
Experiment a Little
Make sure you try a few different approaches to get the results you require. We describe center locations, typically fixed, as “Stores.” The searched data is often referred to as “Customers.” Make sure your Stores and Customers have a similar relationship. Sometimes it may help to run a small test to see how the results turn out.
When you experiment, remember you can undo the calculated data your Market Analysis queries have added to datasets by choosing to edit the data in Map and Data, pick Customize Dataset and edit the Calculated drop down option.
Multiple Passes May Get You There
Think of Map Business Online Pro Market Analysis as a toolkit, a jackknife with many small tools that can be applied to solve your problem. For instance, you may want to Search and Segment some location based-data to derive a segmented marketing list for outbound calling for a retail store.
You will notice the seven Market Analysis button tools in Pro broken into these sections:
Search
- Search & Segment Data from Multiple Centers
Distance and Time
- Batch Calculate Distance and Time
- Find the Nearest Locations
Summarize or Enrich
- Aggregate Customer Data
- Summarize Demographic Data
- Enrich a Dataset
Think about how your requirements might fit into these sections. Perhaps the very same data would then undergo a Find the Nearest analysis to help prioritize a direct mail marketing campaign to the potential buys within a ten-minute drive time of the retail brick and mortar store.
And even later, that same list could be appended to show sales data for the sale period.
Multiple passes to generate the overall analysis maybe your best solution. Let us know your thoughts about Map Business Online Pro.
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