Territories allow your locations to be returned as search results when they are possibly not physically present in a given searched area.  This is useful for creating sales territories, defining service areas or delivery boundaries for your locations.

Watch the video series on Territories below. This 10-part playlist dives into every territory feature in detail, starting with a simple example and overview.

You can create territories from:

When a geographic search is performed, and a location includes a territory that coincides with that search, it is included with the search results regardless of the location's latitude and longitude.

Important Note: It is recommended to use County and Postal Territories instead of City Territories as they reduce complexity and need for multiple spellings for the same territory. (e.g. Montreal,QC and Montréal,QC)

When the user searches for a term, commonly a zip code, MetaLocator determines the city, state, country and county associated with that term. These are called administrative levels, and may have different names in different countries. For example, State is sometimes called Province and some countries do not have a "county" level. The administrative levels of the user's search term are then compared to the values found in the territory fields in the data to find matches. The administrative levels of the user's search term must fall within, or be equal to the location's territory for a match to be found A user's search term which is partially overlapping the territory will not match. For example, searching for a state name, such as "Wisconsin" and the territory includes a partial list of postal codes which fall within that state (E.g. 53211) will not return that result.

To create a territory-based search interface, the first step is to create a field to store the territory data.  Go to Fields, then click New in the toolbar.
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Note the available options within the Territories option group.  In this example, we'll create a State List Territory called StateTerritories.

Next, increase the "Field Length" to a length that will contain your list of territories.  For very large lists, use the "BLOB/TEXT" (binary large object) size.

Important note for very large territories: Excel has a cell limit of 32,000 characters. If your territories become very large and you are using excel to import and export data, be sure to consider the possibility that data may be truncated beyond 32,000 characters. Google Sheets supports 50,000 characters. Beyond those limits you can use Import with Append strategy to build very large territories.

Click Save to save field you have created. Repeat the process for every type of territory field you require.

The next step is to add locations with territory data to your database.  This can be done by importing your data in bulk or by editing your locations one by one.  In this example, we'll import the data in bulk.  We've prepared a CSV file with state territories as shown here:
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Download the sample file for an example import file.

We can now import that file by going to Data then Import.  Click the Choose File... button and allow the import to proceed.  Observe that our individual locations now have lists of state abbreviations in our StateTerritories field.  You can see this list by editing a location, and scrolling to the bottom of the Edit Location screen to see the contents of  the StateTerritories field as shown here:

Be sure your Territory values are formatted according to the formatting below, taking care not to add spaces between values except as noted.
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State and province codes can be ambiguous across countries. For example, GA represents both Goa in India and Georgia in the United States. When territories might conflict across countries, the country code can be included in the territory specification.

Counties are classified as Administrative Level 2. We support Administrative Level 2 territories in the US as County and in France as Department Codes. Be sure Get County and Neighborhood is enabled in your interface settings to support County searches. If the data is already Geocoded without county and neighborhood data it will need to re-geocoded. See Territory Options for more details.

US County Format Example

Include the full 5-digit FIPS code, including leading zeros. Do not include an underscore or tract-level FIPS codes.

France Department Code Example

Be sure to include the full department code including leading zeros.

​Postal Code Prefixes

Similar to state codes, postal codes can be ambiguous across countries. For example, 71460 can be found in France, Mexico and the United States. When postal code territories might conflict across countries, the country code can be included in the territory specification.

Now that data are imported, we are ready to create our Interface.  Do this by clicking Interfaces, then New, or you can modify an existing Interface.

Click over to the Territory Settings tab of the interface and set the following option, Enable Territories? : Yes 

Save your Interface and click Preview to see the results.  The default layout provides a postal code search.  Let's try searching for 53202, a Wisconsin postal code.  Recall that none of our locations in the sample data are actually physically present in Wisconsin, yet we do have a single location that includes WI as a territory. Notice it appears in the search results as expected when searching for 53202, despite its physical address in Ohio.

When creating territories, you can designate how the search system should handle the territory results.  Under your Interface Territory Settings you will find a number of options, described here:

When allowing users to match based on the postal code prefix, MetaLocator uses a two settings found under Advanced settings to enable and configure the prefix match.  Shown below, the "Allow Partial Match Keyword" must be enabled to support partial matches.  Additionally, the system will look for postal code territories with the length found in the "Partial Match Keyword Length" setting shown below.
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Polygon territories allow you to specify a bounded polygon as a territory for a given location.  As of this writing, they can not be imported in bulk, only specified in the Control Panel.  To create a polygon territory for a location, first create a field under Fields.

Once created, open the location to which a polygon territory will be assigned.  The new polygon territory field will be found under Custom Fields and will be displayed as an interactive map.

Pan and zoom the map to the desired area for the territory.  Then click points on the map to set the boundaries in a clockwise manner, clicking the first marker as the last step to close the polygon.

Once the polygon has a shaded, filled area, save the location.  To re-draw the polygon, click "clear" below the map.  Only one polygon per territory field can be specified.  For locations with multiple polygon territories, create additional polygon territory fields as needed.

Presuming the Interface has Data Settings > Enable Territories? : Yes enabled, any search that resolves to a latitude/longitude contained within the boundaries of the drawn polygon (or polygons) this location will be returned as a result.

Radius territories allow you to specify a circular range around which the location will be returned as a search result.  The field should contain the numerical value in kilometers for the radius.

Global territories are useful when a single result should be returned for all search geographies.  A global headquarters is an example where this might be useful.

When you have multiple territory fields that might apply only to certain Interfaces you can limit the territory fields applicable to a given Interface by selecting those fields as shown below:

If empty, all territory fields are considered in the Interface.

Territories can be defined to apply only to a specific category. In this scenario, a category commonly represents a product, service or therapy a location is contractually permitted to sell in a specific geography.

To enable territories by category, set this setting to "Yes". Also be sure the Enable Territories is set to Yes.

The data for territories by category can be specified in the bulk import as shown below:

In the above example, the first row includes a state territory for any/all products for WI and MI, but only Camp products in IL and MN and only Hike products in PA. The values in the square brackets are category names and stateterritories is the field name of the territory field.

During import, be sure to leave the territories by category fields as "Create as Custom Field" as shown below:

Important: The row must include the categories for which any category-based territories are defined. E.g. to include a Camp territory, the row must also be in the Camp category.

The first row above appears as follows after the data is imported.

A few observations on how this affects search in this example:

The "Show Only Active Categories" setting allows users to dynamically filter the category drop-downs based on the Interface Filters. This is sometimes used to filter categories based on country. For example, if categories are used to display products and services, and those services vary by country, the Show Only Active Categories setting dynamically filters the options to only those available in the requested country. The Interface Filters determine which categories are displayed, either as set in the configuration, or when deep linking.

If a country has been deep linked, or searched by the user, the system will include any categories for which there are location results in either geography or territory. This determination is made by applying all interface filters to determine the available data set, then applying territory search logic based on the requested country.

The country may match any shape of territory that overlaps, or is contained within the requested country. This ensures that when a user arrives at an Interface filtered to, for example, the United States, the category drop-down will include any categories offered in that country, even if it's only offered in a single state or postal code, for example.

If non-country-level territories are "cross border", where a location may provide services in a foreign country, other than the country in which the location is physically located, the territory data syntax should include the country code. This would account for, for example, a location in Canada, that has postal code territories in the United States as below:

Live search provides the ability to update results based on the user's movement of the map. This behavior performs a search based on the center of the map, using the map boundaries as the effective radius for the search. The Results > Update Results on Map Move setting controls this behavior, and is an option of live search.

Update Results on Map Move is not compatible with territory search. When the user drags the map, the system would then need to drag zoom and pan the map again to position it around the results for that new map center, creating a poor and chaotic user experience. For example, a user is looking at search results in TX and moves the map to include a small part of the state of Louisiana. There is a result in the state of Washington that services Louisiana and the map would then need to zoom out wildly to display the Washington result. This experience gets more confounding when multiple international territories are involved.

To use territories with Live Search the “Update Results when map moves” must be turned off.

When using City Territories or when you are not sure the exact territory value for a specific search, use the geocoding test tool to identify the value used by MetaLocator when checking the territory field. This will show the components returned for a specific search, which can then be used to refine territory values. This is especially helpful when the geocoder, or your data, might use an alternative spelling for a city, state or region name.

Excel Users: Important Note for County, Postal Code, Postal Code Prefix content:

Data handling in Excel can accidentally convert the list of entries to become a representation of a very long number. Spaces are allowable following the comma separating entries; e.g. 01003, 01025, 01031