How do I get the best/most accurate geocoding results for addresses?

Geocoding is the process of transforming a description of a location—such as a pair of coordinates, an address, or a name of a place—to a GPS location on the earth’s surface.

Geocoding functionality is available in various parts of our system, e.g. in Form screens as an Interaction option on the User Action (Button) field type.

We use a third party geocoding service to perform the actual lookup of provided addresses.

The results of an address lookup are not guaranteed to be successful or accurate – the accuracy of results greatly depends on:

  1. Whether our third party service has data available for the given country/area, and
  2. The amount of detail within, and the format of, the address text you provide

We strongly recommend that you format addresses in accordance with the following guidelines to maximise the likelihood of a fast and successful result:

  • Specify addresses as explicitly/fully as possible.  Try to use as much of the following format as possible:
    Street Number, Street Name Street Suffix, County/Suburb, City/Town, State/Province, Zip/Postal Code, Country Code/Name
    e.g. 14, Some Street, Beverley Hills, Los Angeles, CA, 90210, USA
    or    14, Some Street, Los Angeles, 90210, USA
  • Always use commas to seperate parts of the address
    e.g. rather than specifying an address as ’15 Some Street New York USA’, rather use ’15, Some Street, New York, USA’ .
  • Always provide the country name/code, post code and state/province whenever possible

  • Do not specify additional address elements such as business names, unit numbers, floor numbers, or suite numbers that are not included in the address as defined by the postal service of the country concerned
  • Use the street number of a premise in preference to the building name where possible
  • Do not provide ‘hints’ such as nearby landmarks.