This article brought to you by Precisely.
Accurate postal addresses play a vital role in most business analytics. Whether your aim is to understand your target customers, the physical infrastructure of an area, traffic flows, or even weather patterns, an accurate address is an essential first step toward linking meaningful datasets. By leveraging addresses, that place provides important context to how and why things occur as they do.
For example, most data points exist within some kind of geospatial context. For instance:
- Consumers almost always have a primary residence address.
- Businesses can have an office address, one or more warehouses, satellite offices, and more.
- Products you buy must first move through a supply chain, stopping at multiple physical locations along the way.
Most of the data that matters can be associated in some way with one or more addresses, which is why address data is an important link in providing the context you need to understand the relationships between multiple entities. A customer’s home address can offer clues to their income level, lifestyle, and what services are around them, for example. Businesses operate in the context of a broader economic environment, and location may offer clues as to a company’s competitive climate, its physical plant, and potential environmental risks.
Location unlocks a world of contextual detail about customers, competitors, markets, and opportunities. But you can only gain access to that information with accurate location data. Accurate, standardized addressing can be a meaningful first step in that process.
But on the road to achieving all those benefits, there’s a common challenge we see across industries: address verification and accurate geocoding (adding latitude and longitude coordinates).
Challenges of Managing Addresses
Postal addresses can be the common thread to join disparate datasets together, but working with postal data, especially across multiple countries, can be a real challenge. It is extraordinarily difficult to standardize addresses due to variations among street names, spellings, abbreviations, numbering systems, and formatting options – especially across multiple countries. And without a verified address, it’s virtually impossible to join datasets and analyze information in its full context.
Some of the common sources of confusion and issues we see include:
- One street with multiple names, such as “Amherst Street” and “Route 101A”
- Abbreviations that lead to multiple variations of a single address
- Names and numbering schemes that may be subject to change
- Language variations
That’s why you need the right address verification and geocoding technology, or geo addressing – to ensure accurate and standardized address data that meets your application requirements and budget.
Location and Geo Addressing
The solution to common addressing challenges is access to complete, accurate, and contextual data. This is accomplished using a combination of geocoding and address verification, which we at Precisely call geo addressing.
We offer the world’s leading solutions for both geocoding and geo addressing, and curate one of the largest, most accurate address databases on the planet. Our geo addressing algorithms resolve addresses to a highly accurate location, even in many cases where basic information has been omitted. We can correct errors in addresses and assign a latitude and longitude coordinate based on our vast global database of address locations.
In addition to inaccuracies, addresses are highly complex and constantly changing, and our Geo Addressing solution is built to tackle errors and complex formatting issues head on – thanks to the ability to:
- Match and validate the accuracy of addresses with Address Verification
- Associate latitude and longitude coordinates with Address Geocoding
- Enable easy and efficient look-up with Address Autocomplete
- Append a unique and persistent identifier also known as the PreciselyID for ease of enrichment
Let’s talk about that last point a bit more.
At Precisely, we don’t simply see an address as a random collection of text fields. Instead, we standardize, geocode, and verify that address, making it possible to link that information to a trusted unique and persistent ID.
The PreciselyID is a unique and consistent identifier attached to each address during geocoding. In the same way a DUNs number removes ambiguity about a business’s identity, a unique identifier resolves questions about a location.
While the PreciselyID can help to manage and organize data, it also brings greater context to data by linking an address to location-based information in one of our 400+ enrichment datasets. The unique and persistent nature of the PreciselyID facilitates this seamless data interoperability for data enrichment.
More than ever before, your address data can help you discover critical relationships in your data.
Precisely’s Geocode API
No need to rely on applications or on-prem solutions, simply access our Geocode API to integrate these industry-leading capabilities into your application or existing architecture. Your application will have ongoing access to up-to-date and accurate geocoding and address verification services.
And it’s simple to do; Precisely customers are leveraging the power of location to drive game-changing insights. Using our Geocode API for Snowflake, for example, one Data Integrity Suite customer achieved a 10% uplift in geocoding performance, with an implementation time of only 5 minutes.
Precisely’s Geocode API capabilities build data that is trusted and rich in context, when and where it’s needed most.
Key Takeaway
Addresses are as complex as they are valuable. But to fully realize that value, you need to tackle those complexities with reliable geo addressing solutions, building data that’s complete, accurate, and contextualized. Our APIs are easy to use and fit for any budget. As a result, you’ll spend less time fixing errors and missing opportunities, and more time making better decisions for your business.