How can I lower my map units?

There are many factors to consider if your AMP usage is higher than anticipated. Most of the time there are a handful of updates that can be made to help decrease your map unit consumption. The list below are common items we see that can quickly help lower your costs, some of which apply to interactive maps, static maps, or both.

  1. Understand how your 3rd party library is requesting tiles. Some libraries will pull tiles around the map canvas to enhance the user experience, but this will require more AMP tiles as well.
  2. Define your map canvas with hard limits. This comes in handy when loading maps on different sized monitors.
  3. Give users the option to add / remove layers and only display a default layer.
  4. Limit the panning / zooming that is allowed on your interactive map. Most 3rd party libraries will allow you to pass a zoom limit and set a bounding box for panning limits. Here's a Stack Overflow article doing this specifically for Google Maps.
  5. In development you could use more map units than expected. If you have your developer tools open in your browser and you have the "Cache Disabled" button checked, you won't be using browser cache to redraw tiles from an area you've already panned over.

Also, feel free to reach out to our support staff to discuss your specific use case as we might be able to lend a helping hand.