Different addresses are geocoded to one point

[Anonymous User]

I recently uploaded a list of addresses and ran into several issues. As you can see in the below pictures one particular point has 7 data points mapped at that one location. However, the 7 data points represent 6 different addresses. I looked but couldn't find a particular thread or help section that addressed this. Thanks for your help.

[ChrisWhitmore · Accepted solution]

Hi Matthew - when you uploaded the file, there was a dialog that listed the fields inside the file. The dialog should have also displayed which fields will be used for geocoding. Typically, this relationship is obvious (City -> City) and easily deduced but sometimes an address field isn't easily interpreted. Looks like that may have happened in your case, judging from the fields in your screenshot. The 'Addr1' field didn't correctly map to Address level matching in the geocoder, which explains why the seven addresses were all centered in the City (which was correctly matched).

You can fix this be re-adding the file and selecting the Addr1 field to be the Address location field, as shown below.

To fix:

[Anonymous User]

Thank you Chris. That was the issue. In an attempt to redeem myself a little I'll explain how I messed that up. When I originally uploaded the file, as you said, the Addr1 field was not linked to address. So I changed it to Address. After making that change I noticed that the "Region" (not in your screen shot) was "World" and not "United States". I then changed it to "United States" and while I thought it would save the Addr1 -> Address pairing it did not. So it defaulted to the city only. When you originally posted your response I didn't think that would be the solution as I remembered selecting Address. Thanks for your help. While the map now is much more accurate I'm a little disconcerted that other users suggest using a different geocoder as the Esri World Geocoder may not be the best option. Is that something I should be concerned about? I plan to spot check the map I just created but I don't want to have to validate all of the points.

Thank you everyone!

[ChrisWhitmore]

Great, good to hear! Makes sense on what happened with the Addr1 field resetting to unmatched. When switching regions, the fields revert to the default matching as outlined above. This happens for basically the same reason - different regions have different address matching fields (province, district, locality) so it's difficult to make assumptions when switching regions if the field name is not a fairly explicit match.

As for the Esri World Geocoder vs a custom geocoder - the Esri world geocoder typically has high accuracy (at least when I've used it and seen reported). What others may be referring to is that sometimes the address field matching may not sync up with your data, resulting in less accuracy (as you've experienced). This has sometimes happened with zipcode fields containing hyphens, for example. With a custom geocoder, you have control of the configuration options for the geocoder and can tailor it to match your data (for instance, if you have high precision addresses like apartment numbers you could potentially match to specific apartments).

[MichaelVolz]

Matthew:

If your addresses do include apartment numbers, ESRI has introduced an out-of-the-box (OOTB) locator style to handle these subaddresses at v10.3 and newer.  If you have not upgraded to v10.3 yet, you would need to create your own highly customized locator style (I believe there is a customized locator style for 10.1 and above available for download from the geonet site, but it is not supported by ESRI so I would not recommend going this route - If you are interested I could provide the link to the specific geonet thread).

[Anonymous User]

Thank you Michael and Chris. As I progress with the mapping I'll have to see what makes the most sense. Thanks for your help.