Overview – This class will go through everything there is to know about Hot Spot Heat Maps, including the definition, use cases, benefits, best practices, and the steps involved in creating them.
Learning Objectives – After completing this class you will know how to create a Hot Spot Heatmap, as well as having a strong understanding of the benefits, use cases, and best practices associated with this map type.
What is a Hot Spot Heatmap?
Like Regional Heatmaps, Hot Spot Heatmaps are also used to measure and analyze patterns of high and low activity. However, while a Regional Heatmap works based on boundaries, a hot spot heat map is ideal when boundaries of territories or regions aren't your priority. It's best when examining high and low activity patterns and identifying clusters.
Use Cases
Identifying customer clusters and market analysis
Understanding where your customer inquiries are coming from and matching that to your current sales coverage is a very common heat mapping use for sales. The hot spots help to easily visualize what your addressable market currently looks like, and as a result you can quickly decide where your current sales coverage levels are appropriate or not. From here it is very easy to reach decisions around gaps and around overlap.
Understanding where profits are being generated
Heat maps are a wonderful way to demonstrate where your profitable customers are based, and how these locations compare with each other. You may want to look at a more detailed understanding of where particular products are performing, or where discounting is taking place and to what extent.
Benefits
Easy to identify market or market coverage gaps
Creating a Hotspot Heat Map makes it easy to view where your customers or sales/marketing leads are located, and so in turn, helps you to identify the areas you should be targeting for marketing. Alternatively, it could be a way of checking your already existing markets against your customer locations, to see if there are gaps that need to be filled.
Steps to create
As previously mentioned in Module 4 Class 1, the Hotspot Heatmap can be created using the style menu. Once in the style menu, click the ON button beside the heatmap option and your heatmap will be created. The hotspot map can be used as a visual heatmap based on point density, or integer values that are in your dataset. The Hotspot map defaults to darker colors for low density areas, and brighter colors for high density areas, but these colors can be changed using the colored dropdowns. The Low, Medium, and high values can also be set using the text boxes beside each option.
The transparency of the heatmap can be set by typing a value in the Transparency box. The size of the radius of the hot spots can be changed, with the default being 25 pixels. The type of radius can also be changed to either pixels, miles, or kilometers.
Average density is the density of the data if it was equally distributed on the map. This average density is set as 100%. At the low/10% mark, the data is at 1/10th the density of the average and at high/200% the data is at least twice the average density. The average density is calculated for an individual dataset i.e. it is different from dataset to dataset.
The radius option lets you alter the area of influence of a single point i.e. how much area a point represents/impacts.