Overview
The State Sales Heat Map is one of the most simple, powerful and useful ways to visualize data. All you have to do is drag and drop this Insight Panel onto your dashboard and, in just a few seconds, you’re going to get sales for last week across the country in an interface that is simple to understand and interact with. Within this panel, you can quickly change time periods using the time legend across the bottom of the panel, or you can quickly change retailers in the settings menu using the gear icon. This Insight Panel is highly customizable, and it is designed so that you're never required to do a lot of heavy lifting. We've also designed the Sales Heat Map so that, while it's insightful on its own, its power is unleashed when combined with other Insight Panels. Used in combination with other panels, it gives you the ability to better see what’s going on with your products, and you can monitor trends quickly without having to recreate the wheel all the time. The Sales Heat Map is also designed to be an interface through it is easy for you to get quickly to the reporting interface. If you wanted to see what’s going on with sales in Florida, you can click on Florida, and the panel will quickly zoom into the state of Florida, and you can see what’s going on on a store level.
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.
Anatomy of a State Sales Heat Map
Inspiration Corner:
- Time saving tips and tricks video here!
- Link to Insight page
- Link to Insight page
- One unorthodox way to use this particular Insight Panel!
- Link to Insight page
- Link to Insight page
- More in-depth application of this Insight Panel that possibly includes running custom reports and other more advanced features!
- Link to Insight page
Getting Around the State Sales Heat Map
The primary purpose of the State Sales Heat Map is to quickly show you what is happening with your products across the country, using simple geographic visualizations. From this overview, you can quickly change parameters to see new variants on the map without having to compile several different reports. The heat map makes it easy to drill down into more detailed views and also allows you to quickly get into the reports with raw numbers, all without having to compile data and run reports the old-fashioned way. On top of all that, Avantalytics makes it easy for you to share your data with your colleagues and customers, and it will always have the most up-to-date data, automatically. Let's check out how the State Sales Heat Map works:
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.
Quick Tip: Did you know that you can change the parameters of any report you run by double-clicking on the parameter you want changed?
Using the State Sales Heat Map With Other Insight Panels
Describe the secondary feature of the insight panel
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Video or photo of Insight Panel demonstrating this feature.
Video Overview of Insight Panel
