Five Practical Reasons to Geocode Your Business
- Nov 17, 2023
- 1 min read
High-quality geocoding makes smartphones smarter, marketing messaging more actionable and enables businesses to serve customers in more relevant ways – all fueled by geographic insight. But, despite its clear and proven benefits, geocoding is often misunderstood. That’s because the task of transforming descriptive text into geographic coordinates is complex. It requires multiple datasets and a series of interdependent operations, such as parsing, normalization and standardization, to be effective.
To understand how this process works, it’s important to consider two distinct types of input data: relative and absolute. Relative input data is a textual description of a location that, when combined with other information, will output a spatial illustration. This includes USPS ZIP codes; ZIP+4 codes; complete and partial postal addresses, including PO boxes; cities; counties; intersections; and named places. Absolute input data is a textual description that, when converted, will output a geographically precise representation of a location independently of other locations. This can include the coordinates of specific street addresses, building numbers and landmarks, or the coordinates of a parcel centroid.
With a clearer understanding of complexity of geocoding, it’s critical for organisations to carefully select their service providers. Service providers that promise rooftop accuracy, for example, should be tested to ensure they do indeed deliver on this claim. This will prevent costly errors from erroneous mailings, missed shipments and lost opportunities to engage with customers. Learn how to choose the best geocoder for your business today.
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