1. Create a Loqate account
If you haven’t already, sign up for a Loqate account. Signing up for a new account gives you a 14 day free trial, which gives you the opportunity to test your integration, experiment with our range of products, and experience the practical benefits they can bring to your organisation.2. Choose an integration method
You can integrate with Loqate in various ways, from auto-generated code snippets to full API integrations. The option you choose will be determined by the nature of your business and what you want to achieve. For the purposes of this article, and for the sake of simplicity, we’re going to assume you’ll at least partially be using an API integration, but see our Ways to Integrate page for more information about all of the options.Not a developer?
We have a no-code option for Address Capture, Email Validation and Phone Validation, which we refer to as a Tag setup.
See our Ways to Integrate page for more details,
or our Tag Setup Guide to get started.
3. Create an API key
All Loqate services require an API key for authentication purposes, so you’ll need to create one before you can start making any API calls. You can set up generic API keys or service-specific keys, and then apply various limits and restrictions to each, but to begin with we recommend creating a generic API key for the purposes of initial testing and setup. To do this, click on the Add Service + button at the top of the screen in your Account:
4. Make some API calls
If you’ve chosen a Tag setup (see the Ways to Integrate page for more details about this), you can go ahead and test the form(s) on your website to see how Address, Email and/or Phone Validation works. If you’re going to be using APIs, the next step is to make some test calls using your new API key. Here are some simple examples, which you can run in Postman or in a browser. Make sure you swap the placeholder API key (AA11-AA11-AA11-AA11) in each for your own API key.Address Capture Find
Address Capture Find
A Find call uses a text search to find addresses and places - this returns an address ID which can then be used in a Retrieve call.
This example is looking for addresses containing ‘GBG’ and the postcode ‘WR5 3DA’:Here’s what that call should return:Make note of the “Id”, which you’ll use in the following Retrieve call.
Address Capture Retrieve
Address Capture Retrieve
Once you’ve completed a Find call and have the outputted address ID, you can use that in a Return call to get the details of that address.
Here’s an example using the address ID generated in the previous call:Here’s what that call should return:
Address Verify
Address Verify
Here’s a sample Verify call with no additional options, just a single address to verify:And here’s what that call should return:
Email Validation
Email Validation
Here’s a sample call for a single-email validation request:Here’s what that call should return:
Phone Validation
Phone Validation
Here’s a sample call for a phone validation request (we’ve included an example number of 01234 567890,
so replace this with a real number you want to validate):Here’s what that call should return:
5. Check your usage
Once you’ve made a few API calls, head over to the Reporting page in your account. Here you’ll be able to see usage summaries per key (or across your account as a whole), showing both charged and free requests and, if appropriate, the total cost of them so far. For example: