Welcome to the January 2024 Release Notes where we're ringing in the new year with new data!

Places Highlights

• +80K open, US POIs including ~45k service based contractor businesses
• Continued logic improvements for parent/child Geometry relationships ⭔
• +200k hand drawn polygons for major US retail brands

Accuracy

Note: Following the January 2024 release, SafeGraph will report accuracy metrics on a quarterly basis. The next report will be included with the April 2024 Places release.

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 sample two zip codes (one urban and one rural) to measure our accuracy. This month, we're revisiting the same zip codes as our first accuracy metrics release from July 2023:

• 94103: San Francisco, CA - Representative of Urban
• 98110: Bainbridge Island, WA - 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 measurement? We're taking suggestions!

Places Growth

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month, SG Places has a grand total of 51,698,704, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 9,576 places from last month.

Open POI Gains

We've added a grand total of 15 brands across 21 countries including:

• KBC Brussels (SG_BRAND_f55b93b39582bb4d) with 1,133 POI
• iRiparo (SG_BRAND_dd3135af5b542bed) with 356 POI
• CSOB (SG_BRAND_c0775d945680ffec) with 344 POI

We also increased our non-branded POI coverage in the US - particularly around service based contractor businesses. We added a total of +80k non-branded US POIs, and the following categories saw the largest increases:

• Building Equipment Contractors (2382), Building Finishing Contractors (2383), and Other Specialty Trade Contractors (2389) with +45k POI
• Lessors of Residential Buildings and Dwellings (531110) with +20k POI 🏢
• Photographic Services (54192) with +13k POI

Permanently closed, point POI losses

This month, we retired our collection of opened_on and closed_on dates for all "point" POI brands (where geometry_type = "POINT") like ATMs, EV charging stations, and kiosks as the information used to infer opened_on and closed_on dates for point POI brands is brittle compared to our standard brands. As a result, all branded point POIs with a previous date in opened_on now show null in this column, and all branded point POIs with a previous date in closed_on are no longer in the places product. The following countries saw the largest decrease in point POIs as a result of removing the permanently closed locations:

• -30,417 in US 🇺🇸
• -11,399 in NL 🇳🇱
• -9,847 in FR 🇫🇷

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

Geometry Improvements

We continued to make meaningful improvements to our Geometry attributes in the January Release:

• We added logic to handle additional scenarios where certain types of POIs house one or more “child” POIs, resulting in 5.6% more POI as parents and 1.1% more POI as children. Examples of the newly addressed scenarios include:
  • Rental car locations, sightseeing tour/excursion companies, and other POIs commonly located within hotels will now be children of the hotel.
  • For certain larger retail POIs such as grocery stores, separate sections of the store such as the cafe or sushi bar will now be considered separate POIs that are children of the larger grocery store POI.
• We also added +200k hand-drawn POI polygons in the US in 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:
  • Macy’s (+65% up to 87%)
  • Staples (+65% up to 93%)
  • JCPenney (+54% up to 78%)
  • Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft Stores (+48% up to 72%)
  • Sonesta Hotels & Resorts (+39% up to 66%)

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 1,683 brands with at least one store closure in November 2023 and 1,999 brands with at least one store opening in November 2023:
  Learn more about our open/close columns here

Drops ⬇️

• We are ingesting many sources and due to source changes and processing changes, Placekeys do drop over time. In this release, we dropped 504,348 Placekeys (159,280 branded and 345,068 non-branded). ~100k of these drops are due to the intentional removal of permanently closed, point POIs.