Your map is the key to a treasure chest of hidden consumer insights.

Perhaps you don’t feel you have “consumers”? But knowing how people interact with your map tells us a great deal about the experience they are having and how they see your map experience. For the sake of this article, lets call these people ‘consumers’; they are consuming your map, and their behaviour patterns are gems of insight waiting to be polished.

Consumers use different maps in different ways of course. So they should, every map has a different purpose. That, is a key point to this discussion. The idea of a map having a discrete purpose, perhaps a map could even have a “conversion“, to use typical web terminology is somewhat new. The map conversion concept challenges us to consider maps as serious, measurable website profit centres.

This idea goes way beyond that of a web map just being a piece of eye candy.

This idea instead speaks to your map being a valuable piece of your web site’s information architecture and as such should be measured. From what you measure, you can further extract trends.

From measuring our web maps we can begin to look at how our consumers navigate through them. We can look at where they click, at what ‘velocity’ they travel.

Then we can start to clump users. We can look at where users in Vancouver are looking, for example. We can start to discern previously unknown consumer insights and trends. We can start to see how user map navigation habits change internationally. We can look at how local markets behave in comparison to each other.

And then we can start running tests.

Maptiks is providing a completely new set of consumer insights. Perhaps this doesn’t change everything, but it does give it a geographic context, and we all know… location is the new black.