Overview
Places is a Localytics feature that allows you to send geopush notifications to your end users when they enter or leave a predetermined geofence. To read about sending a places message, follow this guide.
There are a few ways to load Places geofences in Localytics. We’ll go over those in this article, as well as walk through the Places dashboard.
Places Dashboard
To navigate to the Places dashboard, click Places under the Marketing header in your dashboard. You can also use this handy link if you're logged in.
On the dashboard you can do one of four things:
- Create a single place,
- Upload a CSV of Places,
- Edit event attributes for Places,
- Search your Places .
Let’s walk through each.
Create a Single Geofence
If you’re creating a new place, you can do some from the Places Dashboard. Click the + button to create a new place.
This will open the Create a Geofence menu. Here you’ll be able to enter the Location of the geofence (including its radius), the information for labeling on the Localytics side, and analytics tracking information.
For the location you’ll need to have:
- Longitude
- Latitude
- The Radius of the geofence (sliding scale)
And for the information:
- Identifier (what we’ll call it)
- Description (an explanation greater than the identifier)
- Labels (we’ll use these later when you need to pull in a group of places for a single message—ex, Boston, museum, city, etc)
For analytics tracking, you’ll have the option to decide if Localytics tracks entrances to the geofence, exits, both, or neither. Simply check the boxes that apply.
Once you’ve finished creating your geofence, you should see the map at the left identify your location. Click Save to finish.
Upload a CSV File of Geofences
You also have the option to upload your geofences as a CSV file to Localytics. Several parts of the CSV file are required. Those parts are:
- Identifier (ie, name)
- Latitude
- Longitude
- Radius
Everything else listed is optional but highly encouraged.
To upload a CSV file, you’ll want to click the upload button on the Places dashboard (next to the green New Place button).
In the upload modal, you’ll have the option to download a sample CSV file. This is a great option if you’re just getting started with Places, and need help formatting your upload. Click Download a sample CSV to download the file.
Alternatively, you can download your current list of Places as a CSV file. If you need to make updates to your Places, it’s helpful to use the most recent list of geofences in Localytics. Click Download your existing Places data CSV to access this file.
If you already have a CSV to upload, click the Click to Upload button. Otherwise, we support drag and drop upload—so you can upload your CSV by dragging it into the browser window.
The last thing in the modal is a sample table for what your CSV file should look like, along with definitions and examples for each of the columns. Here is that chart:
| identifier | description | latitude | longitude | radius | labels | active |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Store # 290003 | Newbury St. Location | 42.350187 | -71.080062 | 500 | ma | boston | big city | new location | true |
| A unique identifier for your place. | A description for your place. | The latitude of the center of your place. | The longitude of the center of your place. | Radius of your place in meters. | Pipe-delimited (|) labels, used for grouping similar places for campaign targeting. | Whether the place is active. When set to false, the place will no longer be monitored by devices. |
Custom Places Event Attributes
You can set custom event attributes that trigger when an end user enters or exits a Places geofence. You’re limited to 10 event attributes, so use them wisely. Once they’re created, you’ll be unable to rename or remove them.
To add Custom Places Event Attributes, click the ellipsis on the Places dashboard. Select Configure Event Attributes from the list.
This will open the modal to create new attributes.
Editing Individual Places
The last thing you can do on the Places dashboard is search for and edit individual geofences. Use the search bar at the top of the page to find the geofence you’re looking for. Use the Filter option to look for geofences under a specific label.
Clicking on the ellipsis next to any individual geofence will give you three option:
- View Analytics
- Edit
- Deactivate
To view the analytics of the geofence, click View Analytics. More on that in the next section.
To edit the geofence, click Edit.
This will pull up the edit modal for the geofence. This is the same workflow for if you’re adding an individual geofence, so check out the guide above for more information.
Deactivating and Deleting a Geofence
If you need to deactivate your geofence for any reason, you can do so from the Places dashboard.
Find the geofence you’re looking for with the search bar. From there, click the ellipsis at the end of the line, and click Deactivate. This will successfully delete the geofence from Localytics.
If you’d like to bulk delete geofences, we recommend using the Places API.
The last thing you can do from the Places dashboard is View Places Analytics. This will take you to the Events section of your Analytics dashboard. Here you’ll be able to see all of the data about this Places that Localytics tracks. To learn more about events, check out our Events article.