Spatial analytics with Alteryx Designer – making sense of your geographical data
At operational level (sales, logistics, marketing) and at strategic level there are many decisions that need to be made. And often they’re based on spatial analytics and geographical data – which can easily be done in Alteryx. These analyses are needed besides the usual performance indicators. This is why Alteryx Designer makes it easy to import geographic data (such as shapefiles) from different file formats and combine them with your other data.
Creating geographical data
If you’re working with spatial analytics with Alteryx, you won’t only “analyse” geographical data you have. Probably you will need to create your own dataset. With Alteryx you will be able to easily convert different types of data (coordinates, addresses, etc.) to geographical points! Create locations and surrounding trade areas with the create point tool and the trade area tool. Combine points to routes or areas with the poly-build tool, and get started. Calculate distances or travel times with the distance tool. Find the nearest points with the find nearest tool. Determine area overlap and/or routes with the “spatial matching” tool.
Creating geographical insights
Usually you’ve already created a certain amount of geographical data while running spatial analytics in Alteryx. Now you can directly proceed to create insights from the data you’ve created. This easily translates into interesting analyses for business users. Sometimes it’s easier to present real-life examples, so here below some use cases:
- You can easily understand how many of your top 10 customers are within 50 km of your logistics centres
- You can see if the three considered locations for your new store don’t overlap with the scope of your affiliates.