Welcome to the December 2023 Release Notes! ⛄️🎅🏼🎁
Our last release in what has been an incredible 2023.

Places Highlights

• +265K new POIs across the globe
• Improved Logic for parent/child relationships ⭔
• Geometry Improvements for Multi-Tenant Buildings ✂️

Accuracy

SafeGraph evaluates the quality and completeness of our US POI data on an ongoing basis using two key metrics:

• Coverage Rate: The percentage of real and open SafeGraph POIs compared to the industry standard. In the US, this is Google.
• Real Open Rate: The percent of SafeGraph POIs we claim to be real and currently open compared to those that actually are real and open.

Each month, we randomly select two zip codes as a method of sampling one urban and one more rural area. This month we're looking at:

• 94301: Palo Alto, CA - Representative of Urban
• 94574: St. Helena, CA - Representative of Rural

Here's the summary (full breakdown on the Metrics page):

Check out our Accuracy Metric Methodologies for more detailed info on how we arrived at these calculations.

Interested in a particular zip code for a future month? We're taking suggestions!

Growth

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month SG Places has a grand total of 51,689,128, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI and parking lots. This is a net increase of 264,946 places from last month, including:

• +214,825 in US 🇺🇸
• +3,270 in MX 🇲🇽
• +2,114 in GB 🇬🇧
• +1,421 in CA 🇨🇦

Of course, you can always visit our Places Summary Stats to find more details on our continued growth.

Geometry Improvements

We made several meaningful improvements to our Geometry attributes in the December Release:

• We added logic to handle additional scenarios where certain types of POIs house one or more "child" POIs, resulting in 13.1% more POI as parents and 6.6% more POI as children. Examples of the newly addressed scenarios include:
  • Doctors and other medical professionals located within medical facilities like doctor's/dentist's offices and pharmacies are now children of the medical facility
  • Certain POIs located within university campus footprints are now children of the university
• We fixed a bug that affected a subset of POIs with large footprints and one or more child POIs (e.g. a grocery store or big box store that is a parent to a coffee shop and a pharmacy). This bug had caused their polygons to be "sliced up" inappropriately, breaking spatial hierarchy and making them inaccurately small.
  • In the example below, we can see a Fred Meyer grocery store (zzw-226@5w9-jcw-g8v) in Boise, ID and its child POIs, which include a bank and a pharmacy. The polygons in red show the faulty polygons from the previous release. The polygon in blue is the new, corrected polygon for Fred Meyer and its children present in the December release.

• We have been making efforts to decrease the number of shared polygons across prominent retail brands. We measure this by tracking and attempting to maximize the percent of POI that have polygon_class = OWNED_POLYGON. In this release, many brands saw substantial increases in the percent of their polygons that are now "owned", including:
  • REI (+20% up to 94%)
  • Ross Stores (+17% up to 83%)
  • Regal Entertainment Group (+17% up to 86%)
  • Target (+15% up to 73%)
  • Walmart (+14% up to 67%)
  • The Home Depot (+12% up to 85%)

Expect continued improvements to the Geometry product in future months. Please reach out to your CSM or Eugene Chong ([email protected]) for any questions on these changes or the upcoming Geometry roadmap.

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 2,102 brands with at least one store closure in October 2023 and 2,421 brands with at least one store opening in October 2023:
  Learn more about our open/close columns here

Categories

The POI we've added this month span a wide range of categories, including the following additions:

• POI with geometry:
  • Lessors of Residential Buildings and Dwellings (531110) with +25,964 POI 🌇
  • Offices of Physicians (except Mental Health Specialists) (621111) with +13,443 POI 🩺
  • Offices of Lawyers (541110) with +12,762 POI ⚖️
• Point-only POI:
  • Other Gasoline Stations (447190) with +8,498 POI 🔌

Drops ⬇️

• We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 97,443 Placekeys (39,866 branded and 57,577 non-branded).

Known Issues or Bug Fixes

• For Hardees (SG_BRAND_2b6b8e67fe1433e4f73bbe2c306fb330), all values for store_id now reflect the new values.
• In GB, the count for Morrisons (SG_BRAND_512ef2658762ed7867313f26e137fa42) no longer includes its child brand McColl's (SG_BRAND_8a8ad2fc4d0077da).