Polygon search

Also called: Draw-on-map search, Custom area search, Geofenced search.

Sales territories rarely follow city limits. A service area might be three suburbs and half a county, or everything east of a river. A polygon search lets you draw that shape and search inside it.

The shape does two jobs. It decides where to search, because the area is broken into smaller pieces that each get their own searches. And it decides what to keep: businesses whose coordinates fall outside the polygon are flagged or dropped, even if a search near the edge returned them.

That second job is where most lists go wrong. Searches near a boundary always pull in neighbors, so a list for "Scottsdale" often contains Phoenix and Tempe businesses. Checking each result's latitude and longitude against the polygon is the only way to be sure.

Polygons can be drawn by hand, built from a radius around a point, or imported from a KML file exported from Google Earth or a GIS tool.

Example

A pest control company draws its service area covering parts of three Dallas suburbs. The search returns 900 businesses; 140 fall outside the shape and are labeled as out of area.

In Leadraft

You can draw a polygon, set a radius, upload a KML file, or name a city, county or postcode. Scope is chosen before you search (inside, inside plus nearby, or everything), and out-of-area results are never charged.