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Overview

The advantage of this map is that it allows you to visualize your sales data, and you can quickly understand what’s going on without running several different reports first. If you want to see how a product sold at Store A compares with how the product sells at Store B, you can click on the settings menu, change the retailer and see immediately how the sales of the item compared during the same time period.

Getting Around the State Sales Heat Map

Let's look at how to use the Sales Heat Map for Acme Brick, our fictitious business. The first thing you want to do is select the State Sales Heat Map from the Insight Panel dropdown menu located on the left-hand side of the web page. Simply drag and drop it onto your dashboard to get started. When it appears, you can see that it has loaded with some default settings, which are pointed out both in the scrolling text in the Insight Panel Title as well as in the larger font displayed in the Time Legend.

If you want to look at what all the parameters have been set to by default, this is very simple to do. You simply click on the Settings Gear in the upper right hand side, and you can see all the parameters that were used to not only create the State Sales Heat Map, but which parameters would be included in the underlying report you are able to access (we'll get to that in just a minute). Changing the parameters is also simple - just select the parameters you want from the drop down menus provided in the settings. In this instance, we learn that the default settings for Sales Metric and Time Period were YOY retail sales growth and prior week, respectively. If we want to change the Sales Metric to show YOY unit growth for a different retailer instead, all you have to do is select your desired parameters from the Retailer and Sales Metric menus, click save and, in a few seconds, have a brand new map showing us unit growth.

In this instance, you can very quickly see that there has been growth in the middle of the country and decline in the west and on the East Coast. In particular, the Dakotas look very strong. If you worked for Acme Brick, you may want to know what is going on there. If you can determine the successful formula that is working in the Dakotas, you can apply it to the faltering areas. Remember, all this takes just a few seconds to get this deep into the data, because you are not spending all of your time compiling data into various reports to pore over. Drilling down, like everything else so far, is very simple. Just click on one of the states (let's pick South Dakota) to get a better picture of what is going on. As you will see in the video below, the overall number for South Dakota doesn't show that sales are skewed even higher in Billings. If you want to know what is going on in Billings, one click brings you to a detailed report, with all of the parameters of the report detailed in the blue area located in the upper left hand corner of the report.

Using the State Sales Heat Map With Other Insight Panels

Another great feature of the State Sales Heat Map is that it plays well with others. We've designed this Insight Panel to be effortlessly linked to the Category Overview & Market Sales Overview Insight Panels. Changing some of the parameters in the Settings Gear will automatically change these complimentary reports, so we highly recommend creating a dashboard that consists of these three Insight Panels, tweaking the parameters to suit your needs and then using the view to get an even more in-depth view of how your products are performing across the country just as quickly as with just the State Sales Heat Map. The video below demonstrates how this feature works:

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