Welcome to the May 2022 Release Notes
Our global growth continues with our latest monthly release.
(2022-04-30/1651333333 shipped 2022-05-05).

Highlights

• +353k new POI across the globe
• +199 new brands across 101 countries
• +278k new POI in Germany, including non-branded 🇩🇪
• New websites column in Places provides related URLs
• Panel Updates for our Patterns product

Places

Enhancements

SafeGraph is delivering more POI each month in countries around the world. This month SG Places has a grand total of 18,940,134, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI and parking lots. This is a net increase of 353,298 places from last month (+6,246🇺🇸, +7,781🇨🇦, -10,010🇬🇧, +349,281 outside these geographies):

• + 362,136 standard POI (+5,210 🇺🇸, +7,673 🇨🇦, 687 🇬🇧, +348,566 )
• - 8,838 point-only POI (+1,036 🇺🇸, +108 🇨🇦, -10,697 🇬🇧) +715 )

The decrease in point-only POI in GB stems from the cleanup of one of our ATM brands and the removal of some duplicate entries.

Germany
Of the POI added around the world, +278k of them are in Germany 🇩🇪, including both branded and non-branded places. Some of the highlights include:

• Full-Service Restaurants (722511) with +41,205 POI
• Hotels (except Casino Hotels) and Motels (721110) with +15,794 POI
• Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars (72215) with +11,248 POI

New Column: Websites

With this release, SafeGraph is now offering websites as a new premium column in the Places product. This column will include any URLs known to be associated with a given place, like the URL of a brand's website. If more than one URL applies to a given place, we'll include multiple. Here are a few examples:

• Subway: ["subway.com"] 🥪
• Yarn Shoppe Studio Denver: ["yarnshoppestudio.com"] 🧶
• Jamba Juice: ["jamba.com", "jambajuice.com"] 🥤

You can read more on the specifics and formatting of the column on our Places docs site.

Brands

We've added a grand total of 199 brands across 101 countries. Some of the highlights:

Notable brands

• Banco de Crédito del Perú (SG_BRAND_1b382d0e12224602) with 7,343 POI
• REWE (SG_BRAND_1b5aa93d5a3eabba) with 3,686 POI 🛒
• Rite Aid Pharmacy (SG_BRAND_feb40688b49e4c49) with 2,181 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 1,460 brands with at least one store closure in March 2022 and 1,611 brands with at least one store opening in March 2022:
  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:

  • Full-Service Restaurants (722511) with +43,475 POI
  • Supermarkets and Other Grocery Stores (445110) with +19,564 POI 🛒
  • Commercial Banking (522110) with +18,491 POI
  • Co-Working Office Spaces (Other Lessors of Real Estate - 531190) with +10,933 POI

• Point-only POI:

  • Other Gasoline Stations (447190) with +2,686 POI which are our EV Charging Stations
  • Financial Transactions Processing, Reserve, and Clearinghouse Activities (522320) with +2,645 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 139,584 Placekeys (44,797 branded and 94,787 non-branded).
• To keep track of the status, predecessors, and latest successor of each Placekey, you can try using the Lineage API.

Bug Fixes and Known Issues

• SafeGraph consolidated duplicates and improved the canonicalization of certain region names. We also addressed some of the postal code handling at or around boundaries. The vast majority of these adjustments occurred internationally in countries where we have recently added new POI. The following are the counts of POI impacted by the improvements made in different geographies. If you have any questions, please contact your CSM.
  • Region improvements:
    • For example: We've consolidated values like ["New South Wales", "NSW", "NSw", "New south wales"...] to be a single value of "NSW" in all cases for POI located in the New South Wales region of Australia.
      • US: ~100
      • CA: ~5,600
      • GB: ~500
      • Rest of world: ~626k
  • Postal_code improvements:
    • For example: Identifying KH110302 as the appropriate postal code for a POI over KH110101 (an adjacent postal code)
      • US: ~1,200
      • CA: ~144k
      • GB: ~7,200
      • Rest of world: ~113k

Geometry

Enhancements

With this release, we replaced 150k synthetic polygons in the US with precise polygons. This brings our overall US polygon coverage to almost 98%!

Premier Polygons

Every month, we highlight some of our favorite new polygons getting released. This month, here are a few of the large shopping centers added in Germany 🇩🇪

Patterns

Enhancements

• In last month's delivery, SG Monthly Patterns had 4,750,974 (US only). This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 4,947,976 (net +197,002).

• Last month, SG Monthly Patterns had 1,193,701,324 visits from 42,188,184 visitors. This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 1,194,021,229 visits from 41,171,760 visitors (delta +319,905 visits, -1,016,424 visitors).

• Our Neighborhood Patterns product, provides more generalized foot traffic flows across census block groups or dissemination areas.

  • In the US we have 2,365,814,214 raw stops (-7,993,291 from last month).
  • In CA we have 40,025,426 raw stops (-332,360 from last month).

Panel Updates

You may notice a decrease in visitation volume and overall panel size beginning with our upcoming Weekly Patterns delivery on May 11th (covering the week of May 2nd - 8th) and our next Monthly Patterns delivery in June (covering the month of May).

We are undergoing a change in the Patterns device panel that will affect new releases moving forward. In short, one of our upstream partners has introduced processing changes to improve privacy protection, and we've made some corresponding changes to our process for creating our Patterns data sets. Our changes will minimize the impact of the supply update and optimize the continuity and consistency of the foot traffic data you receive from SafeGraph.

From our analysis, the impact of these changes should be fairly minimal on the common use cases of this data. While some volume counts may decrease, the overall trends represented by the panel are very consistent across both the US and Canada.

As you know, providing high-quality foot traffic data without sacrificing the privacy of mobile device users is of utmost importance to SafeGraph -- and to every mobility data supplier with whom we choose to do business. If you have any questions regarding these changes, please reach out to your CSM.

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

What's New

• Open/Closed Filters: You can now search for POI based on their opened_on or closed_on` dates. Say for example, you want restaurants in a given city that have opened within the past 60 days.