Initial Sync & Ongoing Sync | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• An overview of the Initial Sync and Ongoing Sync process

Overview of the Sync

As covered in the Syncing Listings with Content Module, an update flows from the platform through our publisher Exporters (that handle any data transformations and any publisher specific logic) before it gets sent to our publishers and ultimately to the consumer-facing site.

This is the flow that happens behind the scenes during both the Initial Sync and Ongoing Sync phases, which you’ll learn about in this unit.

Initial Sync Overview

The Initial Sync represents the first time that we sync an entity’s data to a publisher. We call this an initial sync because it’s the first time that we will actively push data to an existing listing, or create a new listing.

As discussed in the Searching & Matching unit, the Scan will return a number of results and Yext will review the results and pick the “best listing” to match to for each entity on each site. In the example of Awesome Business, we would sync to the best matching Listings on Google and Facebook, while creating a new listing on Bing where we did not find a suitable match.

If there were multiple listings returned for your entity, otherwise known as Duplicates, you can suppress those via our Duplicate Suppression product (you’ll learn more about this later in the Duplicate Suppression module).

Overall, listings should go live 2-3 weeks from the launch date, many going live within a couple days. In general, we recommend checking the Help Center for publisher-specific wait times or known delays.

Ongoing Sync

This is the steady-state for your listings. Any time an update is made to your entity in the platform, we will send that update to the publisher. At any given time, Yext will sync data to one and only one Listing per publisher. On a continual basis, we may receive updated information from a publisher with things like Analytics, Reviews or Data Suggestions.

For the most part, you’ll see updates happening in less than a few minutes. Remember that from the moment you make the update in the platform, the update goes through a few systems both at Yext and at our Publisher before it displays to consumers.

Ongoing updates should be reflected on publisher sites quickly, if not in real or near real-time. However, we recommend waiting 1-2 days before escalating any issues, or checking in our Help Center for any publisher-specific wait times if needed. You’ll learn more about escalating issues in the Listings Statuses module .