Heard at ONWARD: How Advance Auto Parts Finds Success with Yext

At ONWARD 17, we hosted a series of sessions featuring Yext customers in conversation with Yext leaders. We asked them about their thoughts on the Intelligent Future, discussed recent changes in their field, and discovered how they've found Success with Yext.

Founded in 1932, Advance Auto Parts is the largest retailer of automotive replacement parts and accessories in North America. Serving both professional installers, and do-it-yourself customers, Advance Auto Parts operates over 5,200 stores, 100 Worldpac branches, and serves nearly 1,300 independently owned Carquest branded stores.

At ONWARD, Heath Bradbury (Digital Innovation & Customer Experience, Advance Auto Parts) sat down with Zahid Zakaria (Director, Data Strategy, Yext) to discuss how the company uses Yext to accomplish its strategic marketing initiatives, what they're doing that can be applied outside of the retail industry, and its vision for the automotive retail industry moving forward — including how AI, augmented reality, machine learning, and big data attribution come into play.

Prior to partnering with Yext, Advance Auto Parts had challenges managing the complexity of digital knowledge for its corporate-owned stores and independently-owned Carquest stores, and needed a solution to ensure online consistency and consumer discoverability during a period of relocations and consolidations.

Since partnering with Yext in December 2016, Advance Auto Parts has been able to create and enhance more than 137,000 listings and suppress more than 5,000 duplicate listings. In addition to this, Yext helped Advance Auto Parts see a 16% lift in Google Search and Map views, as well as 10% more traffic to its local pages.

"Nothing is going to send a customer running to a competitor faster than if they show up to your store expecting it to be open, and it's closed," Bradbury said. "And when you have a lot of store relocations, that becomes a big issue. The Yext Knowledge Engine helps us manage and update data like store hours and addresses at scale."

Learn how Yext helps its customers achieve success. Check out our Customer Showcase.