How to Initiate a Location Listings Launch | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• An overview of the Location Listings Launch process
• How to initiate a Listings launch
• What to do if you want to stop syncing to a listing

The Location Listings Launch Process

In the last module, we covered the full Listings Sync process for all types of entities and customers:

But, how do you get started? If you’re an Enterprise brand and you’re trying to launch Location-like listings, you need to initiate a Listings Launch in the platform. Once you put your request in, our team will start to get to work on the Sync process outlined above.

If you’re a Small Business, you can get started and manually authenticate, search, match, and sync your Listings for each entity one at a time. If you need assistance on any of these steps, visit our Help Center.

How to Initiate A Location Listings Launch

To initiate a Launch Request, you’ll want to navigate to Listings in the navigation bar and click All Listings. If you are not synced on any publishers yet, you should see a screen that has zeros in the hero numbers at the top of the page.

To initiate a launch, click on the More Actions drop-down button, and select Listings Launch.

Then you select the publisher you would like to launch listings on.

After your initial launch, this process will be the same to launch on additional publishers.

The Launch process is broken into the following four sections based on the publisher and processes:

• Extended Network (all other publishers)
• Google
• Facebook
• Apple

The Extended Network refers to all publishers that are in your subscription offering outside of Google Business Profile, Facebook, and Apple. This includes a set of sites from the Knowledge Network dependent on your region and vertical. The Extended Network does not require any additional steps to sync — once you request to launch, Yext will work in the background to push your data to those listings.

Google, Facebook, and Apple all require additional steps for launch that are specific to that publisher and therefore need to be launched individually. Users will submit additional information for these sites and this information will be reviewed by internal teams at Yext to configure the appropriate settings.

When you click into each, you’ll see a form to fill out specific to that launch with tooltips for each question to help guide you along. First, you’ll need to select which entities you want to launch. Next, fill out any questions and add any additional comments that you’d like our team to be aware of when syncing your data. As soon as you click submit, this will generate a ticket for our Listings Sync team who will correspond with you via email throughout the process with any questions, comments or concerns.

We’ll cover the Google Business Profile and Facebook launch checklists as part of the publisher-specific Modules.

How long does it take?

It depends! Some Listings will sync faster than others, but typically it will take 2-3 weeks after the request is submitted. As we covered, the scanning and matching process is the most time-consuming phase of the launch and the time it takes is directly correlated to the number of entities you have and publishers to sync with. That said, you can always check-in with the team and ask for a status update by replying to your launch ticket email.

How do you stop syncing an Entity on a Publisher?

You have a couple of options if you want to stop syncing a listing:

1. You can remove the Entity from syncing to all Listings by removing services from the location, which we’ll cover in the next unit.
2. You can opt-out of a listing while staying subscribed by selecting one or more listings on the All Listings screen and choosing More Actions > Opt Out. This will turn off syncing to that publisher. You can re-sync at any time by selecting the listing and choosing More Actions > Opt In.

If your location has closed, we do still recommend keeping your location on Listings for a period of time after closure, typically 3-6 months, a process which we colloquially refer to as the “Closed Store Policy”. This process will help indicate on the Listings that the location is closed, either by sending a closed flag to the publisher, or by updating the content (e.g., by adding ‘Closed’ to the business name).

A “Closed Store Policy” helps maintain a presence for your closed business for your loyal customers and drive them to another nearby location, or to your website to continue their business. There’s nothing worse than showing up and finding out the location you thought was open is closed — by keeping your listings up for a few months, you give your loyal customers and search engines time to digest the information.

What happens if I choose to stop syncing or cancel Yext?

We always encourage you to continue to manage your listings, whether you do that through Yext, another service provider, or in-house by your marketing team. While we’re sad to see you go, we understand that it happens.

When you opt a location out of Listings or cancel altogether, Yext will simply stop syncing. When an update is made in the platform, we will no longer send that update through the delivery pipelines to the publisher. At that point, we recommend that you make sure to claim your listings either through another vendor or manually, otherwise it is very likely that the publisher’s data will start to become out of sync via unverified data sources like Data Aggregators.

To read more about this, we recommend reading this blog post or visiting the What happens when a Listings subscription is cancelled article in the Help Center.