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Welcome to GreatData!
In today's video, we'll be talking about multiple counties per ZIP Code.
It's a great product! We were the first company to create this type of product.
Basically what it is is for every ZIP Code out there, we'll show you the counties that it crosses and the % of that ZIP code that the county crosses.
We created this initially by aggregating over 40 million address-level records from the U.S. Postal Service.
And we took the county that they said the ZIP Code was within.
So if 60% of the records we found were in county X, then that's what we put, and 40% for county Z.
We knew there were some errors and we had fixed some of those and had overrides for them.
But we had a client call and he said that he was finding errors [in a competitor's ZIP Code Database product] and wanted us to check it.
We found that we had some of the same errors.
We looked into the original Postal Service data and the reason for our errors was that their ZIP Code data was wrong a lot of the time.
So we had to fix it! We used our mapping technologies and a lot of just plain, hard work and we solved the problem!
The following will show you some examples of the before and after.
On this map is the county boundary for ZIP Code 00650.
The U.S. Postal Service data had it showing 100% in Florida County.
But as we turn on the boundary for the county layer, you can see clearly that the bulk of it is in Florida County.
But it crosses another county here, here and here.
So actually, this ZIP Code belongs in 4 different counties.
Using mapping data, we were able to find this and fix that.
If you look at our competitor's data for 00650, you'll see that it's 100% in Florida County, but that's just incorrect.
On this map is ZIP Code 05444.
This line here is the boundary of the ZIP Code. It's a big ZIP. It's in rural Vermont and it covers two counties.This line divides the county.
This is Franklin County. Here's another one, and you can see that it's about a 60% / 40% split, but the Post Office will say that it's 100% over here.
Or, some places will say it's 99%, but either way, clearly its not over here.
It's here about 60% and here about 40%.
Our data reflects that. If you look in competitor's data for ZIP Code 05444, you'll see that it shows it nearly 100% in a totally different county.
Now we're going to look at ZIP Code 01223.
This push pin shows you 01223. It's what we call a 'Point ZIP.'
A Point ZIP could belong to a PO Box, or a large business or a government agency that has their own private ZIP Code.
But a Point ZIP doesn't occupy any General Delivery area, so it's only one point--it's not a whole ZIP Code.
This ZIP Code boundary that you see is actually ZIP Code 01011 that it's [01223] surrounded by.
And this is 100% in Berkshire County, but the Post Office data doesn't show that. It shows it in another county that it's not even in 51%.
And then it shows it only 49% in Berkshire. Our product, through our mapping technology, will say, 'ZIP Code 01223: 100% - Berkshire County.'
Thank you for watching! If you have any questions about our products, please feel free to give us a call or contact us by email.
Our information is on our web site: http://GreatData.com
We've been working literally thousands of hours for the last twenty years, improving our data constantly.
We believe that you'll appreciate the GreatData difference!