Geocoding

Narrowing Customer Locations for Commercial Business in Raleigh, NC

A local Raleigh, NC business is interested in reaching more customers and would like to develop a new advertisement campaign.  The local business is interested in knowing where their current customer base is from, at a ZIP code and then an address specific scale, and would like to know where there is a gap in the market to develop new advertisements to attract more customers.

To aid me in narrowing the customer locations I used ArcGIS Pro version 2.9. The customer data was provided to me NCSU GIS 520 course materials, after analyzing the tabular customer data, I realized that in order for me to utilize the data in ArcGIS Pro I needed to create a locator with Wake County ZIP code boundary shapefile as reference. An error appeared that my geometry was incorrect, in order to resolve this issue I used the repair geometry tool and reran the locator tool. The result displayed unmatched, matched, and tied addresses. This means that the addresses that were unmatched did not have a ZIP code to be assigned to. I was able to match some of the unmatched addresses by analyzing the “match score” number displayed, the higher the score the more likely the address belongs to said ZIP code.

To then run a geocoding process of the address specific data I used the Wake County line boundary shapefile and Wake County Streets boundary shapefile provided by the Wake County government. After using the locator I, again, received matched, unmatched and tied addresses. I went through the process of using the United States Postal Service address website to correct some unmatched addresses.

Figure 1: Workflow diagram representing two process levels of geocoding; at a ZIP code layer and street level.

I know that when I receive address information that is in a tabular format and I need to geocode the addresses so I can use the information in ArcGIS Pro. This is due to the fact that addresses in ArcGIS Pro are not inherently a spatial problem. The problem and objective in this assignment was that I needed to present the data at a ZIP code and Street level, in order to ensure the accuracy of the results I learned the importance of using data and resources from other locations and understanding the limitation of the tabular addresses. In order to quickly geocode all addresses provided, it was important to geocode the addresses as a batch and in order for the addresses to be geocoded properly it was important to “fix” errors in the address information, which was represented as matching unmatched addresses.

Figure 2: Map representing Wake County, NC Addresses within ZIP code boundary

Figure 3: Map representing addresses of customers at a street level

A different example that geocoding may be useful is if a vacation hotel in Florida would like to invest in more US advertisements to attract new customers. To begin I would need customer data, the data I would collect would be from the associated ZIP code to credit card used in the hotel system. I would also collect all USA ZIP code shapefiles from ESRI’s database. I would create a locator of the customer ZIP codes with the US ZIP codes as a boundary. If there are any geometry issues I would use the repair geometry tool. I would again run the locator tool to analyze what ZIP codes most customers visit from. I would present the customer data to the hotel as to inform them where most of the customers travel from and suggest that new advertisements should be focused within those ZIP code areas.