5 Methods to track Return on Investment in GIS

I have had the pleasure in the last year or so to speak with many municipal GIS staff and departments. In some cities, GIS and mapping is limited, in others there are a myriad of applications to serve citizens and internal staff using GIS. GIS can be a valuable tool in sharing information with your citizens, the trick is making sure that the investment is worth it. Is the juice, worth the squeeze? How can we measure this? Here are 5 key Metrics you can use to determine if you GIS department is effectively communicating with your populace.

Building Phase

With your clear call to action in mind and your data in hand, it’s time to start building.

Include layers, but not too many
Layers are a great way to display information on your map. But to increase engagement, try to display only a few essential layers at first and let viewers toggle layers for more information.

How to structure your web map to maximize conversions – Planning Phase

Let’s face it – a lot of maps provide some interesting information, but the primary purpose of building a map is to have a user take action. You’re building your map with a strategic purpose in mind, whether it be for business reasons or better user engagement, you’re trying to achieve a specific goal.

14 Conversion Tips to Build Better Maps

Are you looking to improve your web map conversions? Before you get started you’ll want to make sure you’re signed up to a user tracking tool and A/B testing solution. This will help you figure out what metrics you should be focusing on and will provide a big lift in design strategy when you’re testing and strategizing based on data.

Redesigning your Web Map with Confidence

Redesigning web maps takes up a lot of resources, time and can often leave web map builders feeling secluded as they work a project that many people can have an opinion on, but aren’t able to execute on. When done correctly, these projects can have major benefits to your company and the team, but there are always challenges that get in the way of successfully completing the initiative.

1. Is Your Web Map Easy to Navigate?

Users need direction, and poor web map navigation frustrates them. The key is to keep your map designs simple and intuitive. Eliminating confusing labels, and icons.

Most users simply skim your web map and decide within the first 5 seconds whether or not it’s useful to them. To ensure minimal distractions, create a clear call to action and avoid invasive colors or confusing basemaps.

About us

At sparkgeo we make maps, a lot of maps. We also have a product called maptiks which is like google analytics but for your web maps. During the development process of maptiks we were required to capture, process and store a lot of data that was being generated by user activity. golang along with AWS emerged as a natural choice as we shall see the sections to come.

Tutorial for using AWS in golang

This article discusses about using AWS in golang using the goamz library. The official sdk can be found here; bear in mind that it is NOT used for this tutorial since it was in beta at the time of writing.

This is a fairly light-weight, beginner level tutorial to get you up and running with AWS in golang. Though using a third party library, we believe the basics could be translated to the official one.

Category: Tips & Tricks