7 Steps to Choosing the Right Geo Addressing Solution

Location data has become an everyday part of our lives, thanks to the availability of location-based tools on the internet and our smartphones. Mobile map apps with turn-by-turn directions, weather apps, apps for tracking your pizza delivery or ride-share driver, apps for finding gas stations with the best prices — they all use some form of location data, including addresses. Geo addressing capabilities are used in many of our everyday activities.

We tend to assume that getting address data right is something organizations easily do – but that’s not necessarily the case. Poor quality business addresses – addresses for customers, suppliers, and prospects – is a significant business issue. When addresses are wrong, it costs money, opportunities are missed, brand reputation is jeopardized, and customer loyalty is at risk.

Address data is our core competency, so it doesn’t have to be yours

Precisely is here to help. We are the global leader in ensuring address data quality and geocoding accuracy. We do it with geo addressing technology. Our geo addressing and data enrichment solutions enable organizations of all sizes to increase accuracy and consistency of address data and quickly associate rich, relevant, contextual information to each address.

Why Precisely for geo addressing?

Precisely geo addressing consolidates our world-class address verification and geocoding capabilities into a single, feature-rich solution that delivers trusted data for automating decision-making at scale. When you evaluate the marketplace, look to see if other offerings can match the Precisely geo addressing solution.

1. High Address Match Rate

Match rate is the proportion of addresses in your databases that the geo addressing solution accurately matches with the correct address in its reference data. A higher match rate gives you more answers (as long as those answers aren’t false positives!)

Precisely’s sophisticated geo addressing matching algorithms will tease out the right address, even with incomplete input data. High match rates, that are accurate, are essential for automated decision-making applications, embedding geo addressing in business-critical applications, or anytime you want to minimize manual error correction and other human interventions.

A word about coverage and currency

Precisely ensures broad address coverage for all countries in our reference data by combining data from multiple sources into a single unified offering – a challenging proposition in a rapidly changing world. Precisely provides coverage for over 250 countries and territories around the world. Address elements change, like postal codes, neighborhoods, and administrative boundaries. Our monthly updates keep your Precisely geo addressing solution current.

2. Trusted Address Verification

What can go wrong if addresses are incorrect?

• Costly returned packages for ecommerce businesses.
• Unhappy customers if you promote a service to residents who aren’t in your coverage area.
• Major confusion when data quality inconsistencies lead to multiple accounts for a single customer.
• Poor personalization for direct marketing (no one wants to be the “or current resident.”)

Precisely geo addressing provides the most reliable address verification on the market today. We automatically recognize data by country, even down to primary house numbers and apartment units. By managing multi-national characters/diacritical marks and applying casing to correctly format and validate your data, you can reach customers in new, tailored ways.

Build confidence with Address Autocomplete

You’ll be able to capture the right address in real time with Precisely’s Address Autocomplete. It returns a suggested list of complete addresses, based on partial address keystrokes – useful for any local search, checkout, shipping, or billing experience on your website.

3. The Right Positional Accuracy for your Business

When it comes to geocoding, Precisely lets you select the level of positional accuracy that fits your use case and your budget. Demographic profiling, for example, works fine with latitude and longitude calculated to the neighborhood or street centroid. But if you’re underwriting insurance on a house close to the shoreline, you need the pinpoint accuracy of rooftop geocoding.

In any case, your geo addressing solution provider should give you metadata specifying the accuracy your address was geocoding. Companies that use geocodes in automated decision-making processes need this metadata to minimize the risk of decision errors or to flag when an address needs to be manually reviewed. (Read on later in this article for more information on metadata.)

Positional accuracy is key to answering a variety of questions:

• Is a house in an area of high fire risk?
• How can we target our advertising to families living in apartments?
• Which downtown businesses can I service with my existing fiber optic infrastructure?

4. Lightning-Fast Performance

Geo addressing is the foundation of highly automated operational processes where addresses and their locations power the outcome. Precisely can process hundreds of millions of records per hour – which translates into sub-30 millisecond response time per address. What’s more, we do that 24x7x365.

Throughput is also an important factor for cloud-native/big data analytics. If your organization operates or is considering deploying your applications using cloud-native or big data, such as Snowflake, Databricks, Kubernetes, or Spark, you’ll want to insist on a geo addressing solution that runs natively within these environments, minimizing the need for custom software integration.

5. Flexible Deployment Options

Apart from GIS professionals, few business users need geo addressing as their final output. Most users need geo addressing built into their business process workflows and applications. The faster you can integrate your solution into existing and new applications, the shorter your time to value.

With Precisely, on-premises geo addressing is easy to embed into server and desktop applications. Our cloud-based solutions offer the same results and the same rich capabilities as on-premises options. Pick the operating mode that works for your business: client/server, batch, or interactive.

Tip: Our geo addressing capabilities are so easily incorporated into other solutions, many addressing and geocoding solutions on the market today use our technology to deliver their solutions. Choose Precisely for the most up-to-date solutions.

Choose the Precisely deployment option that maps to your business:

• On premises/Private cloud
• Cloud-native/Big data
• Cloud: APIs
• Cloud: SaaS
• Hybrid deployments

6. The PreciselyID: Your Key to Enrichment and Interoperability

As part of our geo addressing solution, Precisely attaches a unique and persistent identifier – the PreciselyID – to every address in our Master Location Data reference dataset, including apartments, suites, floors, or other sub-units of a primary address.

The PreciselyID offers two distinct advantages you won’t find with other geo addressing vendors. One is the ability to seamlessly connect your address data with Precisely’s comprehensive data enrichment portfolio, including valuable information such as weather, property information, points of interest, and even wildfire risk. No complex spatial analytics are necessary as we have done the work for you so you benefit from only one field to match, making joining datasets is straightforward and fast.

7. Metadata for Greater Insight

Geo addressing from Precisely supports automated decision-making and in-depth analysis by generating and delivering various metadata for each address and geocode. This information may include insights into how well the input address matched the reference data, the type of geocoded point returned (such as rooftop versus street interpolation) and its level of positional accuracy.

Metadata about primary-secondary relationships between locations (such as suites within an office building) can also save you countless hours of research. Finally, there’s metadata that consists of links to additional information related to the geocoded location. This metadata can speed up analytical processes by revealing previously unknown relationships between location-related data.

Relationship metadata allows you to quickly track down information about locations with the same primary address (apartment units within a complex, for example). Or if you’re interested in the entire building, that single geocode can give you all the metadata for the individual units within the building.

Precisely offers a variety of geo addressing solutions to fit any project and budget and enable you to focus your expertise on making more informed decisions for your business. Take a deeper dive into how our geo addressing and the PreciselyID work. Read our white paper Geo addressing; Bringing geocoding, address validation, and data enrichment together.