Overview of Listings Sync Process | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• An overview of the Listings sync process flow
• How the Listings sync process varies by entity type

Overview of Listings Sync Process

We’ve talked about how Yext sends data to publishers, but let’s back up to the beginning and talk about how a new Listing gets synced in Yext.

Overall, there are 4 steps to the Listings sync process:

1. Authentication: this is only for those publishers that require user accounts to manage listing information, like Facebook and Google. Yext will prompt users to link their third-party accounts and authorize Yext to make listings updates on their behalf.
2. Search / Match: when applicable, Yext will search the publisher for any existing listings for that entity and match to the best listing for each entity, if one exists.
3. Initial Sync: If Yext is matching to an existing listing, Yext will update the listing with information stored in the platform; if no listing exists, Yext will create a new one with the information stored in the platform.
4. Ongoing Sync: As data is updated in the platform, Yext will update each publisher and for dual-sync publishers receive ongoing feedback that is surfaced in the platform.

We’ll deep dive into each step in this module.

Before we deep dive into each step, it’s important to understand that the process for syncing listings varies a bit for each publisher and type of Knowledge Network. Technically, Yext has Knowledge Networks for each type of Entity that supports Listings. However, it’s easiest to think about the Knowledge Networks in two larger groups:

“Location-Like”

• Locations
• Restaurants
• ATMs/Kiosks
• Hotels
• Healthcare Professionals
• Healthcare Facilities
• Financial Professionals

Events

• Events

The biggest difference between the two is that we do not have to manage the searching and matching step for Events because Events are temporal and happening every day. We automatically create a new listing for all Events. For location-like entities, we will never automatically create new listings or duplicates without searching for existing listings first.

Overall, here’s a reference table for the differences between Location-Like Listings and Event Listings. We’ll cover more details on some of these differences in later modules but this is a good chart to come back to later.

	Location-Like Listings	Event Listings
Launch process is self-serve for brands	Yext Support will handle the matching and searching
Has publishers that require authentication
Requires Searching / Matching
Has publishers that sync in real-time
Supports Duplicate Suppression
Supports Analytics