Welcome to the November 2023 Release Notes! 🦃🍽️🍂🥧
We continue to be thankful for more and more POI!
(2023-10-31/1698726892shipped on 2023-11-01)

Places Highlights

• +247K new POIs across the globe
• +119 new brands across 138 countries 🌐
• Geometry Improvements for Parent/Child Relationships ⭔

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:

• 33131: Miami, FL - Representative of Urban
• 97520: Ashland, OR - 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 51,424,182, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI and parking lots. This is a net increase of 247,485 places from last month, including:

• +180,022 in US 🇺🇸
• +16,641 in MX 🇲🇽
• +7,766 in FR 🇫🇷
• +5,402 in NL 🇳🇱

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 November Release, including:

• We completed a substantial audit of our brand list to account for those brands that often co-locate, or ultimately end up in a parent/child relationship (E.g. think the Starbucks inside of Target).
• We switched to new sources for building footprints in the following US cities:
  • Minneapolis, MN
  • Madison, WI
  • Chicago, IL
  • Miami, FL
  • Indianapolis, IN
  • Somerville, MA
  • Cambridge, MA
  • San Antonio, TX
  • Dallas, TX
    Now their POI polygons will be significantly more precise and granular.
• 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:
  • Menard's (+54% up to 93%)
  • Denny's (+52% up to 88%)
  • BevMo (+47% up to 72%)
  • Wegman's (+19% up to 54%)
  • Kroger (+18% up to 63%)
  • Walmart (+12% up to 54%)

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.

Brands

We've added a grand total of 119 brands across 138 countries. Some of the highlights:

Notable brands

• PEMEX (SG_BRAND_6dd5c75354ff9a01) with 6,378 POI ⛽️
• The Burger Den (SG_BRAND_bf88b6f1cae31aa2) with 1,178 POI 🍔
• It's Just Wings (SG_BRAND_9ed6ba8dab88ce32) with 1,178 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 2,027 brands with at least one store closure in September 2023 and 2,269 brands with at least one store opening in September 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 +16,927 POI 🏢
  • Gasoline Stations with Convenience Stores (447110) with +16,291 POI 🏪
  • Full-Service Restaurants (722511) with +8,641 POI 🍽️
• Point-only POI:
  • Couriers and Express Delivery Services (492110) with +42,284 POI 📦
  • Other Gasoline Stations (447190) with +7,860 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 111,537 Placekeys (35,973 branded and 75,564 non-branded).

Known Issues or Bug Fixes

• For Hardees (SG_BRAND_2b6b8e67fe1433e4f73bbe2c306fb330), all values for store_id have been dropped as they will be changing. The new values will be included in next month's release.
• In GB, the count for Morrisons (SG_BRAND_512ef2658762ed7867313f26e137fa42) will temporarily increase to include its child brand McColl's (SG_BRAND_8a8ad2fc4d0077da). This will be addressed in next month's release.