HomeBlogContact Sales
Changelog
Back to All

April-2022 Release Notes (04/05/22)

over 2 years ago by [email protected]

Welcome to the April 2022 Release Notes 🎉 🎉 🎉
We’re not fooling around this month. This release is seriously one of our largest ever! We’ve got HUGE updates across the board! Read on for more details! 👀
(2022-03-29/1648540807 shipped 2022-04-05).

Highlights

  • +700k new POI across the globe, bringing us to more than 12 million total 🌎
  • +205 new brands across 138 countries 🌍
  • New category_tags for 6 million POIs in the US and CA 🏷
  • Improved NAICS codes for over 1.8 million non-branded POI in the US and CA 🧮
  • Introducing Parking Lots with over 6 million polygons 🅿️
  • Spend now includes non-branded POI and covers over 1 million POI in total 💳

Places

Enhancements

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month SG Places has a grand total of 12,376,710, including POI with or without geometry and closed POI. This is a net increase of 717,382 places from last month (+100,888🇺🇸, +30,029🇨🇦, +32,904🇬🇧, +553,561 🌏 outside these geographies):

  • + 703,015 standard POI (+94,137 🇺🇸, +25,119 🇨🇦, +30,780 🇬🇧, +552,979 🌍)
  • + 14,367 point-only POI (+6,751 🇺🇸, +4,910🇨🇦, +2,124🇬🇧) +582 🌎)

This month we've added over 150k POI in Germany, including independently owned, non-branded POI. Some of the highlights include:

  • 104,935 Restaurants and Other Eating Places (7225) 🍴
  • 17,588 Supermarkets and Other Grocery (except Convenience) Stores (445110) 🍞
  • 17,165 Other Gasoline Stations (447190) ⛽
  • 13,749 Museums, Historical Sites, and Similar Institutions (7121) 🏰

Brands

We've added a grand total of 205 brands across 138 countries. Some of the highlights:

Notable brands 🌍

  • Edeka (SG_BRAND_24da9d90225ec175) with 6,038 POI 🛒
  • Netto Marken-discount (SG_BRAND_0f6f2c08dabcd3d9) with 4,159 POI 🥨
  • Repsol (SG_BRAND_980b992000d5b3c2) with 4,140 POI ⛽

Point POI brands 🔴:

  • Banque National ATM (SG_BRAND_6436fd7d294634d1) with 2,714 POI 🏧
  • Scotia Bank ATM (SG_BRAND_8e228a02ab7760ed) with 2,057 POI 🏧

👀 Are we missing a brand or country? 👀 Please let us know here!

Brand Openings and Closings

  • We rely on POI metadata to track store openings and closings, and we are especially interested in understanding open/close dates for branded POIs. It can take more than a month to infer open/close dates, so we report brand open/close metrics on a one month delay.
  • In this release, we flagged 1,212 brands with at least one store closure in February 2022 and 1,369 brands with at least one store opening in February 2022:
    Learn more about our open/close columns here

Categories

This month, SafeGraph updated our categorization model for non-branded places to improve our NAICS code assignments in the US and CA. This update improved our overall accuracy and incorporated feedback provided by our customers. Note, any place with a safegraph_brand_id was not impacted by this update. Also, we did not change anything about the schema, only some of the values in naics_code and the resulting top_category and sub_category labels.

You can find the full list of NAICS code mappings here, detailing counts from old NAICS codes to new NAICS codes. 1,761,662 POI received a new NAICS codes. Of those, 947,740 POI retained the same top_category label meaning they just moved within the same NAICS code family.

Unrelated to our model change, we also updated the naics_code for the following big box retail brands to 452311 which is Warehouse Clubs and Supercenters 📦. This change was based on customer feedback.

  • Walmart (SG_BRAND_04a8ca7bf49e7ecb4a32451676e929f0) from 452319 to 452311
  • Target (SG_BRAND_42aefbae01d2dfd981f7da7d823d689e) from 452210 to 452311
  • Costco (SG_BRAND_60b7b54d19fca719281e76d485a141ad) from 452319 to 452311
  • Sam’s Club (SG_BRAND_1fdf499b6898e2c4f4c47e72ae249f4e) from 452319 to 452311
  • BJ’s Wholesale Club (SG_BRAND_f114e3e39748c95944856cc06c40af68) from 452319 to 452311

Category Tags

With this release, SafeGraph significantly expanded the application of Category Tags by introducing a new list of beta category tags. Category tags are additional descriptors about a POI providing additional metadata that would not be covered by a NAICS code. Category tags have historically covered bars, cafes, and restaurants (POIs with a NAICS code beginning with “722”). But with this new update, we are expanding beyond restaurants to cover over 6 million POI in the US. This includes both branded and non-branded POI.

A few examples of new categories that will receive these more granular category tags:

  • Healthcare (NAICS codes beginning “622”): Audiologist, Cardiology, Dermatology, etc. 🏥 🩺 🦻
  • Retail (NAICS codes beginning “44”): Outdoor Gear, Jewelry, Sportswear, Party Supplies, Leather, etc.🧥 💍 💼
  • Amusement/Recreation (NAICS codes beginning “71”): Batting Cages, Disc Golf, Go Karts, Arcade, Pool & Billiards, etc. ⚾ ⛳ 🎱

Here is a spreadsheet with the counts by category tag as of this release. And for reference, here is a list of all of the possible tags for each NAICS code.

We'll continue to improve these tags in the months to come. We plan to apply them to more and more brands and also expand the use of existing tags across more NAICS codes. Please share your feedback early and often as we are eager to hear how these new tags are being put to use!

Drops ⬇️

  • We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 139,149 Placekeys (21,684 branded and 117,465 non-branded).
  • To keep track of the status, predecessors, and latest successor of each Placekey, you can try using the Lineage API.

Geometry

Parking Lots

Our new Parking Lots product is a collection of over 6m rows depicting the size and shape of surface area parking lots in the US. Furthermore, each parking lot includes a column referencing nearby POI that likely utilize the lot. If purchased alongside our Places or Geometry products, we’ll include a column for each POI that references nearby parking lots in those schemas as well.

A few introductory stats:

  • 6,203,046 total parking lots
  • 2,613,105 parking lots with at least one associated POI
  • 6,103,384 POI in the US with at least one related parking lot

See our Parking Lots doc site for the full schema and additional details. Also, check out this blog for an inside look on how we developed this new product.

Premier Polygons

Every month, we highlight some of our favorite new polygons getting released. This month, here are a few of our new parking lots! Parking Lots in green. POI in blue.

578

Market Basket (and related parking lot), Somerville, MA

591

MetLife Stadium (and related parking lots), East Rutherford, NJ

1540

Walmart (and related parking lot), Warminster, PA

Bug Fixes and Known Issues

  • There are some changes to SafeGraph Geometry as a result of the improved NAICS code assignments highlighted in Places. SafeGraph references NAICS codes for certain Geometry concepts like Spatial Hierarchy (parent/child relationships) and the enclosed column (see the Geometry schema for details). These concepts also influence how visits are attributed in Patterns. Below is a summary of spatial hierarchy and enclosed changes as a result of the updated NAICS codes from above:
    • ~12k POI are now parent places when they previously were not.
    • ~8k POI are no longer parent places when they previously were.
    • ~66k POI are now enclosed by a parent (enclosed = “true”) when they previously were not - meaning these POIs are no longer eligible for Patterns visit attribution.
    • ~28k POI are no longer enclosed by a parent (enclosed = “false”) when they previously were - meaning these POIs are now eligible for Patterns visit attribution.
    • Note: A majority of the changes are for POI in the Health Care field (NAICS code starting “62”). We can provide the full list of impacted Placekeys upon request. Reach out to our CSM.

Spend

Enhancements

Our Spend product debuted in January 2022 but we never stopped working on improving it. We’re here with our first update on the growth we’ve seen. You can head here for the full Spend Release Notes but a couple highlights:

  • Spend now covers over 1 million POIs! 💳
  • We introduced Spend coverage for non-branded POI 🎉
  • For branded POI, we’ve tripled the number of brands covered to over 3,700 💯 💯 💯
  • And for those we previously covered, over 700 brands doubled their store count coverage ⏫
  • We spent more time comparing our data to public sources like the Census MRTS, where we saw correlations improve in many regions and across NAICS categories 📶

Patterns

Enhancements

  • In last month's delivery, SG Monthly Patterns had 4,682,201 (US only). This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 4,750,974 (net +68,773).

  • Last month, SG Monthly Patterns had 1,003,942,415 visits from 37,030,933 visitors. This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 1,193,701,324 visits from 42,188,184 visitors (delta +189,758,909 visits, +5,157,251 visitors).

  • Our Neighborhood Patterns product, provides more generalized foot traffic flows across census block groups. In the US we have 2,373,807,505 raw stops (+403,441,096 from last month).

  • Neighborhood Patterns is available in Canada! 🇨🇦 Contact your CSM to learn more or add to your subscription. In CA we have 40,357,786 raw stops (+2,875,151 from last month).

Bug Fixes and Known Issues

  • There are some changes to SafeGraph Patterns as a result of the improved NAICS code assignments highlighted in Places. SafeGraph references NAICS codes for certain Geometry concepts like Spatial Hierarchy (parent/child relationships) and the enclosed column (see the Geometry schema for details). These concepts also influence how visits are attributed in Patterns. Below is a summary of spatial hierarchy and enclosed changes as a result of the updated NAICS codes from above:
    • ~12k POI are now parent places when they previously were not.
    • ~8k POI are no longer parent places when they previously were.
    • ~66k POI are now enclosed by a parent (enclosed = “true”) when they previously were not - meaning these POIs are no longer eligible for Patterns visit attribution.
    • ~28k POI are no longer enclosed by a parent (enclosed = “false”) when they previously were - meaning these POIs are now eligible for Patterns visit attribution.
    • Note: A majority of the changes are for POI in the Health Care field (NAICS code starting “62”). We can provide the full list of impacted Placekeys upon request. Reach out to our CSM.

Data Shopping

What's New

  • New Omni Search Bar: Search by Geography, Brand, or Category filters all from the same starting point 🔎
  • Improved Performance: From complex filters to data previews, you'll find everything just moves faster 💨

[Places API] (https://docs.safegraph.com/reference/places-api-overview-new)

What's New

  • Category Tag Search: You can now search for POI by category tags 🔎 🏷
  • Improved Search for Long Names: Our search results have improved when searching for POI names that are especially lengthy ⚡
  • Parent Place Object: For locations with a Parent place, you can now pull in all info related to that Parent within the same query that identified the Child place 🚸