Tips & best practices
Habits that keep your map working and your numbers trustworthy, drawn from the most common mistakes.
This page collects the things that are much cheaper to get right the first time.
Data
Put coordinates first. Everything else is easy to change later, but wrong coordinates cause three problems at once: the store sits in the wrong place, directions send customers astray, and area filters and reports miss it entirely. Check a few rows right after uploading.
Use the Domain type for category columns, never free typing. Hand-typed values drift apart sooner or later ("Dealer" / "dealer" / "DLR"), and once they do, icon rules miss and reports split one group into several rows. See Domain management.
Set display labels right after uploading. Column names from the original file are usually things like ten_ch, dia_chi — leave them and both the data table and the on-map detail panel become hard to read.
Name datasets for people, not machines. A dataset's name becomes the layer name in the public map's legend — a customer seeing data_final_v2 loses confidence immediately.
Maps
Configure the visible fields before publishing. This is the step that decides the most: it is what customers see, it is the scope the search box runs over, and it is the denominator of Profile completeness.
Show only what customers need. Name, address, phone and opening hours cover most cases. Internal columns (management codes, operational notes) are better hidden — tidier, and they stop dragging Profile completeness down for no reason.
But do not hide what customers search by. If people commonly call a store by a name you store but keep hidden, they will never find it. Consider adding that field to the displayed list.
Several store groups: pick the right split. Need to show/hide each group separately? Use separate layers. Only need different icons? Keep one layer and use Conditional style — far tidier.
Publishing
Save ≠ Publish — but only for appearance. Data edits (stores, images, hours) are live as soon as you save. Appearance changes (icons, colours, labels, popups, basemap) reach customers only after you publish again. Confusing the two is the single most common misunderstanding.
Preview at the size you will actually embed. And remember to click Preview before copying the embed code, or you will paste an old size onto your site.
Do not delete a published map just to pause it. Deleting kills the shared link and embed code for good. Unpublishing keeps them.
Reading the numbers
Always read a percentage next to its base. A 100% rise from 2 to 4 views looks identical to 100% from 2,000 to 4,000. The "Previous period" line under each card is what tells them apart.
Do not add Interactions + Views + Directions. Interactions is already the sum of the other two — adding all three double-counts.
Do not read "Direction rate" as the share of customers who visited. The system only knows they tapped the button, not whether they arrived.
Reviewing the chain takes two places. The Monitoring tab watches stores getting weaker; the Needs attention block and Change feed watch stores that have lost all their customers — that group never appears in the store tables.
Do not jump to conclusions from "empty searches". Part of that number is customers with an area filter on, searching for a store in another province — by design, not a coverage gap.
Working as a team
Storage is a shared pool. One person uploading a lot uses up everyone's room, and when it is full nobody can upload. Review the Top users by storage table periodically.
Clean up unused datasets. But check first whether any map still uses one — deleting a dataset removes it from every map, including published ones.
When data looks wrong, open the Activity log first. Filtering by Action type and User usually gives you a lead within a minute. But remember: the log tells you who deleted what and when, it cannot restore the data.
See also: FAQ · Requirements & limits