By displaying your customer points on a map, you gain instant insight into your market distribution.

What Is Geocoding?

If you need to visualize or analyze your customers based on location, Maponics offers mapping and analysis to help. Street-level geocoding your address lists allows you to be exceptionally precise in your geographic selection processes – for example, when trying to find all the addresses within a radial distance from a site location. With Maponics’ address matching and geocoding, we can then create client density maps or perform nearest neighbor analysis. Read below to compare geocoding methods, learn how geocoding can improve your marketing and why Maponics’ services are better.

Why Are Maponics’ Geocoding Services Better?

Maponics provides exceptional mapping services for customer density maps. As a result, we aren’t just a data service bureau. We do the mapping for you, in contrast to many companies that just give you a latitude and longitude and then expect you to do the mapping and analysis. Seamless integration into mapping projects helps you visualize your data.

We match to the address level for qualified addresses. Precise address matching of locations (rather than to the ZIP+4 level) allows superior analysis. Depending on the quality of your list, 5%-20% may not match at a street/rooftop level. We can also tag your file with census codes (tract, blockgroup, etc.).

Rooftop vs. ZIP+4 Geocoding

When comparing our value to the competition, make sure you are clear about the differences between address-level “rooftop geocoding” and ZIP+4 geocoding. With rooftop geocoding, you get a distinct coordinate for every valid address (although the location of the actual physical structure is not returned). For ZIP+4 geocoding, all records with the same ZIP+4 receive the same coordinates. So everyone with the same ZIP+4 shows up at the same point on the map, even if they actually live some distance away from each other. Maponics provides address-level geocoding or “address matching” for the highest accuracy.

More Accurate Geographic List Selects

Geocoding also enables you to be much more precise in your list selects. For example, you may use a “resident occupancy” or other saturation-type list to mail from. But perhaps you only want to mail to people within a certain distance from your sites. Most list providers and database tools will only let you do radius selects based on entire ZIP codes. A few companies offer entire carrier routes or possibly by ZIP+4. In many applications, either of these is perfectly acceptable and is recommended: mailing to an entire carrier route can save mailing costs and for large areas. Maponics can provide you with lists of ZIP+4 codes within any area of the US.

But if you have a very tight radius or other area description that you need to pull from, defaulting to the ZIP+4 could give you many “wrong” names in your list. Rooftop geocoding dramatically reduces this problem. Whether or not you want to see a map, our geocoding services can help you pull a better list.