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February-2022 Release Notes (02/04/2022)

almost 3 years ago by [email protected]

Welcome to the February 2022 release notes! 💘
We're keeping with our worldwide theme as we continue adding places around the globe 🌎
(2022-01-28/1643356807 shipped 2022-02-04).

Highlights

  • +171 new brands across 130 countries 🌍
  • +44k polygons outside of the US, UK and Canada 🌏
  • New Geometry column: wkt_area_sq_meters
  • Canada Weekly Patterns now available for instant download or via the Places API 🇨🇦,
  • Search within Radius now available in the Places API 📍

Places

Enhancements

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month SG Places has a grand total of 11,394,526, including POI with or without geometry and closed POI. This is a net increase of 74,078 places from last month (+17,531🇺🇸, +4,785🇨🇦, +7,025🇬🇧, +44,737 🌏 outside these geographies):

  • + 71,120 POI with geometry (+16,235 🇺🇸, +3,845 🇨🇦, +6,979 🇬🇧, +44,061 🌍)
  • + 2,958 point-only POI (+1,296 🇺🇸, +940🇨🇦, +46🇬🇧) +676 🌎)

Brands

We've added a grand total of 171 brands across 130 countries. Some of the highlights:

Notable brands 🌍

  • Motto by Hilton (SG_BRAND_47c3a4cda4da19b9) with 6,914 POI 🏨
  • Shell Select (SG_BRAND_9ddc9919e55e44ce) with 5,679 POI ⛽ 🏪
  • Deichmann (SG_BRAND_e0b5322f72dfe5d5) with 2,761 POI 👞

Point POI brands 🔴:

  • Santander Bank ATM (SG_BRAND_c9ba1f9272e04460) with 1,911 POI 🏧
  • Comerica Bank ATM (SG_BRAND_7a337b1efd071917) with 463 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 1,047 brands with at least one store closure in December 2021 and 1,179 brands with at least one store opening in December 2021:
  • Learn more about our open/close columns here

Categories

This month, key changes include:

  • POI with geometry:

    • Convenience Stores (445120) with +8,254 POI 🏪
    • Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels (721110) with +7,659 POI 🏨
    • Shoe Stores (448210) with +6,343 POI 👞

  • Point-only POI:

    • Other Gasoline Stations (447190) with +2,772 POI which are our EV Charging Stations 🔌
    • Financial Transactions Processing, Reserve, and Clearinghouse Activities (522320) with +1,514 POI which are our ATMs 🏧

Category Fill Rate -- We monitor category fill rate with 2 metrics: (1) category fill rate across the entire dataset, and (2) category fill rate for branded POI. We want both of these numbers to be 100%.
(1) All POI category fill rate. Last month 99.5%. This month 99.5%.
(2) Branded POI category fill rate. Last month 100.0%. This month 100.0%. 💯

Drops ⬇️

  • We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 51,835 Placekeys (30,856 branded and 20,979 non-branded).
  • To keep track of the status, predecessors, and latest successor of each Placekey, you can try using the Lineage API.

Geometry

Enhancements

With this release, we've introduced a new column in our Geometry product for wkt_area_sq_meters which, believe it or not, calculates the area of each polygon, measured in square meters. Many of our customers do this themselves after the fact so we've included it up front to save the time and effort. 🔳

This column will not be included in existing deliveries to avoid any breaking changes so please contact your CSM if you would like it to be included.

Patterns

Enhancements

  • In last month's delivery, SG Monthly Patterns had 4,653,942 (US only). This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 4,615,222 (net -38,720).

  • Last month, SG Monthly Patterns had 1,081,150,135 visits from 34,769,826 visitors. This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 987,633,784 visits from 33,368,219 visitors (delta -93,516,351 visits, -1,401,607 visitors).

  • Our Neighborhood Patterns product, provides more generalized foot traffic flows across census block groups. In the US we have 1,979,299,073 raw stops (-106,201,414 from last month).

  • Neighborhood Patterns is available in Canada! 🇨🇦 Contact your CSM to learn more or add to your subscription. In CA we have 33,737,545 raw stops (-4,736,861 from last month).

Instant SafeGraph Data

What's New

  • Canada Weekly Patterns - Now you can browse and instantly purchase weekly patterns data for POI in Canada 🇨🇦
  • Improved Filter Options - All filter capabilities, including searches by Brand, MSA and Category, now apply to all datasets, including Weekly Patterns 🔎

Known Issues

Known issues for file downloads:

  • Change in file name: file names have changed. And, in cases where the data order contains a large number of filters, results in a very long file name. For example: MI-AkronOHMSA-AnnArborMIMSA-Atlanta-SandySprings-MariettaGAMSA-Aug…….csv
  • Un-decoded characters in file names: Certain characters are not being decoded in file names, resulting in un-decoded characters such as %20 in file names.
  • Dataset IDs in Column Names: Column names are currently appended with the dataset id that they originated from (Geometry, Monthly Patterns, etc).
    • For example: sg_c__parent_placekey is the same field as the previously named parent_placekey field.
    • And both sg_c__location_name and sg_mp__location_name are the same as the previously named location_name field.

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

What's New

  • Search within Radius - Ever wondered what was within a mile of a given location? Now you can search for exactly that with our Places API. Define a latitude and longitude coordinate and then search for specific POI within a given radius. All other standard search filters can also be applied to narrow the search to exactly the places you want. 📍
  • Full Support for Historical Monthly Patterns - the Places API now supports full history for the Monthly Patterns datasets 📆
  • Confidence Filters for Search - Now you can set a parameter for how strict you want your search results to be (High/Medium/Low) so the expected results best align with your intent in any given use case 🚥