Geocoding Service

What is Geocoding?

Geocoding is a process by which geographic coordinates (latitude and longitude) of a location are determined based on street address, zip code, or other location descriptors. These coordinates can be then be used by Territory Mapper (and most other mapping applications) to graphically locate and plot geographic data points on a map. Territory Mapper then allows you to interact with these point locations (query, align, lasso, etc.) as though they were ZIP Codes or any other map unit.

Why Geocode?

Territory Mapper V4 now supports individual account level alignments by using your linked account information. To take advantage of this new feature you need to link to a data source that has the appropriate account level information. If your account level data does not have latitude/longitude information available then Territory Mapper will plot it at the center of the map layer unit (centroid) that contains it (e.g a ZIP Code). While this may be acceptable for some applications there are some users that will want their accounts plotted with more precision. This is particularly true when 2 or more accounts fall in the same map unit. Today, many corporate data sources already contain this information. You may want to contact your IT department or the provider of your data to see if this information is currently available.

Scrub it Clean

If it is not already part of your data or readily available from your data provider, you can have your data "geocoded". This is an automated process that appends the latitude, longitude and other geographic information to your data. TTG provides this service as a convenience to their clients. Typically, before we geocode a data set, we "scrub" or clean and standardize the address information to ensure its accuracy and consistency. This not only ensures that we get the best possible match from the national street level database but has the added benefit of providing you with a much cleaner data set when the process is complete. Address information is updated with correct ZIP Codes (and ZIP+4 where available), misspellings are corrected and standard USPS postal abbreviations are applied. If you use this data for mailing purposes, this can be a huge benefit since your mailings are much more likely to get to their intended recipients.

Pricing

TTG prices it's geocoding services based on the number of records processed. There is a minimum processing fee of $100 per file (or worksheet or table) processed. To give you an idea on the costs of geocoding your data, refer to the following table:

These costs include both the address scrubbing (cleaning and standardization) as well as the appending of the latitude and longitude information for accurate placement of accounts in Territory Mapper. As you can see from the table above, the cost per record drops quickly to only 3 cents per record. For most businesses, this is a one time investment with the exception of periodic updates and additions to the data.

If you would like a quote for larger quantities of data or would like to have your data scrubbed and geocoded, call your TTG sales representative.