GCP – Optimize your user experience with these Place Autocomplete tips

Place Autocomplete is one of the best features you can add to your app for a more location-aware user experience. With a few lines of code, you can tailor the experience to your users’ needs and context for time-saving type-ahead predictions. We’ve recently published a few videos to help you customize Place Autocomplete so it performs better for users, optimizes cost, and improves conversion rates. Take a look at these three Geocasts on the Google Maps Platform YouTube channel to make the most out of Place Autocomplete.

How to use Place Autocomplete to auto-fill address forms
Turn your address form input field into an address autocomplete bar. Place Autocomplete can help you provide a better checkout experience for your customers. Setting up auto-filling for address forms can help reduce cart abandonment and make address entry easier, faster, and more accurate for your users. In this video, you’ll learn what makes a good user experience in address forms with a walkthrough of the new Address Form code sample.

How to get better results in Place Autocomplete

When your users type a destination into Place Autocomplete, you want them to find what they’re looking for in as few characters as possible. You can use location bias and location restriction to improve the quality of predictions and keep them to the right geographic area. Also, if your website or app is only used in a small list of countries, you can set a property called ComponentRestrictions to eliminate predictions outside that list of countries and use the language  parameter to return results in a certain language. Finally, you can use place type filtering to present more relevant predictions. In this video, you’ll learn how to use Place Autocomplete properties to provide clues that give your app users what they’re looking for with fewer characters.

How to reduce Place Autocomplete costs

Field masks provide a way for API callers to specify the fields that a request should return. You can do this either by setting the fields property when you initialize the Autocomplete service or by calling the setFields method later on. In this video, you’ll learn how Place Autocomplete pricing works and both methods for applying field masks.

Our documentation describes multiple methods for adding Place Autocomplete to a website using the Maps JavaScript API, to an Android app with the Places SDK for Android, and to an iOS app with the Places SDK for iOS. All three of these SDKs support both widget and programmatic implementations, and you can also call the Place Autocomplete service directly through the Places API. 

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