Most of the data that’s being collected by enterprise organizations today has a location component, whether it be the customer’s address, their city, state, postal code, or even the YX (location) itself. In most cases, the database will have the description of the location but not the YX. In order to enable this data spatially, users typically go through a process called ‘Geocoding.’ Geocoding is a process that assigns a YX (Latitude, Longitude) coordinate to the records in your data so that it can be visualized and analyzed in a spatial context. Now you understand where the 'yx' comes from in Alteryx.
You can quickly see the value of using a commercial street data source such as TomTom as the point is accurate down to the building.
Additionally, the output also contains a verified, clean address. This is especially important for mailing/marketing use cases.
There is more you can do using Alteryx then simply plotting your customers on the map.
Enrich your data with demographics, consumer and business data.
Some users take an additional step to understand their markets and their customers to drive location and marketing decisions. This process involves allocating demographic variables to your data to get insight into the customer so that you can better market to them.
There are multiple data options you can interrogate your data with. Alteryx offers a data product that contains a wide collection of Demographic data from both the US Census Bureau and Experian, Mosaic segmentation data, Syndicated (consumer) Survey data, and Firmographic/Business data, in addition to the TomTom spatial data.
You can see that a large collection of data variables is available to choose from, both demographic and consumer behavior variables.