What does the "Other" mean in my geographic areas?

When looking at your geolocation data, such as that found in your Visitor Flow modules, you may see a high count in the "other" category. Let's find out what that means...

Geographic filters are provided to give you the clearest view of your visitor economy

The ZDOS® displays data on where your visitors are going into groupings to give you the opportunity to understand not only the places that visitors go to, but also the general areas in your destination. One of these is a custom area, Regions, which is used to divide up your destination in a unique way not captured by the standard areas, such as cities. You will see these in your Visitor Flow module, as well as other data modules in the ZDOS®.

Areas are used to filter your data.

In accordance with our place-based strategy, when visits to places of interest are filtered through these areas, your data is displayed and organized in this manner to help you see trends in where visitors are going.  

Why is there an "Other" filter for areas?

When there is no assigned area for a POI to be listed within, it falls into a general grouping called "other." This simply means that there was no region specified for the POI to belong to. It isn't a problem or an error - the regions are a convenience for you based on the way you think of your destination. If there are enough POIs that don't have an assigned area, this can make the grouping called "other" show up as a top area. If you would like to reduce the number of POIs appearing in "Other", you'll need to add additional regions to encompass the places with POIs. This is beneficial because the data is showing you have visitation to these areas of your destination and this provides you additional visibility into where your visitors are traveling. 

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What does the "Other" filter look like?

The area filters can appear as drop-downs at the top of your modules.

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The "Other" grouping can appear on a legend of your insight chart.

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Additional questions about the "Other" area grouping?

If you have follow-up questions, or if the "Other" grouping is showing up as one of your top regions, reach out to your strategic data advisor and they can take a look!

Still have questions? Speak to a human 🙂