While all of your layers will live in the same panel, they serve different purposes and appear in slightly different ways.

Regular layers are just the simplest way to map out your points and bring in sets of data. They allow you to map out anything with an address and section off your internal data. You may want to upload a set of competitor data to map out their locations and attach their sales data to see their performance in comparison to you. You can also map out all your employees so that you can see where they are in relation to your potential sites. What you do with layers depends on what you want to accomplish. 

Candidates improve your ability to approve or reject locations and allows you to put a location through several steps of an approval process. Start making a candidate layer by right-clicking the map and select Add as Candidate or click Add New Layer in the Layers panel and make sure that Candidate Layer is checked off. These layers are typically used to map out potential new sites that will be tracked over the course of months or years. 

Your candidates are categorized by colour to make it easy to keep track of what stage a location is currently at.

Typically Contribution layers are used to track and display metrics such as total sales or the percentage of customers coming from different DAs or Block groups. All your customer information is tied to different stores, so you can track how far people are actually coming from. The different columns in the excel file that you upload would hold any metrics you want displayed on the map as well as the unique ID, and address. 

What results is a heat map of the different DAs that contain your customers. Darker red DAs or block groups indicate a larger contribution to that specific location. In this case the total money spent is being displayed in text and through the heat map. 

If you have access to GIS files, you can better customize the map to your liking within the layers panel. For example, using a GeoJSON file, you can map out the boundaries of the City of Kitchener. (If you're interested in mapping out a Canadian city or American county boundaries, contact your Customer Success Manager and we can provide you with a file that contains all of the boundaries.) You can also bring in shapefiles to map out specific points. Upload the files the way you normally would but upload the zip folder that contains the shapefile. 

That's it! If you want more information on how to use layers, use the search bar at the top or reach out to your Customer Success Manager via Chat or email support@piinpoint.com.