Geocoding
What are Geocoding Services?
Geocoding and geosearch capabilities are built into many ArcGIS products.The primary purpose of geocoding services is to convert an address or other identifier (such as postal code) to an x,y coordinate and save the result to an existing record in a database. Batch geocoding falls into this category.
What is a Geosearch Service?
This service provides the ability to search for a feature or point-of-interest based on an address or keyword, and then zoom to that location. The result might be displayed on the map, but the result is not stored for later use. Geosearch does not use any service credits.
How Many Service Credits Does Geocoding Use?
This table shows six typical levels of geocoding.
| Number of Geocodes |
Credits Consumed |
| 1,000 |
80 |
| 2,500 |
200 |
| 10,000 |
800 |
| 25,000 |
2,000 |
| 100,000 |
8,000 |
| 1,000,000 |
80,000 |
Below are some additional examples that illustrate the estimated number of service credits it would take to complete a project.
Scenario 1
An international bank is doing a worldwide site location analysis to determine if their branch locations are properly located compared to their customer locations. They are geocoding 350 office locations and 3,300 target customers.
| Number of Geocodes |
350 office locations + 3,300 customer locations |
| Total Number of Geocodes |
3,650 |
| Credits Consumed |
292 |
Scenario 2
An insurance company is looking at the location of buildings and other facilities that it is considering insuring. This location information will then be aligned with historical natural hazard information to complete the assessment. There are 45 total assets for one potential customer, and they have 100 similar customers that they analyze in one year.
| Number of Geocodes |
45 assets x 100 customers |
| Total Number of Geocodes |
4,500 |
| Credits Consumed |
360 |
Scenario 3
A state is locating the polling places for an election and comparing them to population centers. The state’s voting age population is 3,062,309 and there are currently 468 polling places and 54 additional ones are under consideration. Only 10% of the people in the state have a different address than when the study was completed the previous year.
| Number of Geocodes |
(3,062,309 voting population x .1 different address) + 468 polling places + 54 polling places |
| Total Number of Geocodes |
306,753 |
| Credits Consumed |
24,540 |
Scenario 4
A non-governmental organization (NGO) wants to geocode the locations of refugee camps by city so they can compare them to the locations of field officers. In 2011 there were an estimated 200 refugee camps. The NGO has 900 field officers that they will assign and expect to do this assessment weekly.
| Number of Geocodes |
200 refugee camps + 900 field officers x 52 weeks |
| Total Number of Geocodes |
57,200 |
| Credits Consumed |
4,576 |