During your implementation process, you get to set up a filter that will group your POIs by areas. Here's how to draw what you want those regions to be. (We promise it's easy!)
Using MyMaps to Draw Your Regions
In line with our Place-Based Strategy and how it helps you leverage your data to give you the clearest view of the visitor economy, you will be able to break your destination up in a custom way to view your data beyond just the county or city level. To make it as simple as possible to draw your regions, you can do this in MyMaps by Google. Watch the video below to learn how to do this, and see below for some helpful tips and reminders as you set these up.
Tips And Reminders For Drawing Your Regions
- These regions DO NOT CAPTURE VISITATION for everyone who goes inside them-- That would just leave you with a lot data you don't need, like road traffic. Your regions will essentially be a grouping of your POIs we use once we import all your POIs into the ZDOS™.
- You will be drawing a shape around your regions, not single lines. When you are drawing the edges of your regions, they need to be continuous clicks when making a polygon or you will have to start over, drawing the polygon again. (no fun!)
- Make sure the start point of the line you are drawing around your region connects with the very first point so it makes a complete polygon
- Make sure you are in the region layer, not the boundary layer, while you are adding lines for your regions.
- If you accidentally do edit while in the boundary layer and it moves the boundary, make sure you click undo so it moves back to the original place.
- Visualize where your POIs will land on this map and that is how you will know where to draw your regions around. For example, if you have a college campus with a bunch of POIs, make the region that they live in surround the entire campus so when you filter your data in the ZDOS you will filter using the region titled "College Campus" you will see all the POIs in the college campus region.
- You don't need to make your regions a re-drawing of your counties or cities, as we already have those filters for you
- Be sure to cover your whole area. Some regions will be super small but hold a lot of POIs (like a downtown area) others will be large with a few POIs (like a rural area) just make sure the entire boundary is covered. Any POI that doesn't fall in a region you have drawn will be classified as being in a region called "other" which isn't very helpful when you are looking at your data to understand where your visitors are going.
- You need to have a Gmail account to edit this map. So, if your work email is not through Gmail, send your Implementation Specialist either your personal Gmail address or you can make a new Gmail account so you can edit the map.
If you want your regions to align with your legislative defined boundaries.
Zartico's ZDOS™ supports data by Political District Boundaries. A District Boundary Map shows a specific jurisdiction's boundaries according to the records on file with the state, county or city. Types of maps may include Commissioner or Justice Maps; commonly known as Districts, Superintendents, Parishes, etc.
In order to use these boundaries, you will need to provide us with the District Boundary Maps at the beginning of your contract and when boundary changes occur. If you do not have direct access to their boundaries through your GIS department, you need to contact their local government's GIS department to gain access to the District Boundary Maps.
Then you will provide us with the maps as a polygon data type:
- Polygons should not overlap
- Polygons should have a name per feature
We prefer these maps be in shapefile (.shp) format; however, we can also access GDB, KML or geojson files.