Infographic: The Cost of Bad Location Data

Every day, people look online for locations of businesses that they are ready to visit – only to be failed by their local search experience. The address is wrong, the phone number's not there, or they can't find the business at all. For businesses, this disconnect not only means lost foot traffic, but a lost opportunity for new customers to discover their location for the future.

In order to find the scope of the problem, industry analysts, Andrew Shotland and Greg Sterling, looked at local listings from more than 40,000 business listings. The data is from companies using location information software from Yext. The full impact of their findings is published in the Yext Quarterly, but the Cost of Bad Location Data infographicsummarizes both the problem and the dollars being lost.

The team found missing and incorrect information across industries – from Retail and Restaurants to Insurance and Banking. Some of the findings were:

• 18% of listings of listings have a missing or incorrect phone number. For Insurance companies and agents, it's even worse – with 30% of listings not having the correct number available when customers are looking for a new policy.
• 43% had missing or incorrect addresses. As people get more mobile with their devices, the impact of this problem – spanning from maps and navigation to local search engines – will only get worse.
• A full 14% of listings of businesses were missing across industries. Although there are many ways that inaccurate information are preventing visits, the team looked deeply at the cost of missing listings (where it is sure that customers will not find them digitally) to calculate just a part of the problem.
• Just for missing listings, the cost is $10.3B a year for the businesses who are not present. This number was calculated looking at how much more choice consumers now have as they purchase offline and how digital is changing the game for local businesses.

The problem of fragmented and hard-to-manage location data has been created by the new digital world, and at Yext, we know that technology is also bringing the solution – both for businesses and for the people who visit them.

The full report is available in the Yext Quarterly, or for the infographic, please download it here. For the full Yext Quarterly, download here.