Trick or... delicious data treats? Hope you've got a digital sweet tooth! 🎃 Welcome to the November 2024 release notes 📝 .

Places Highlights

• Revamped Category Model improves naics_code for millions of non-branded POIs 💥
• Updated stock_exchange and stock_symbol for hundreds of publicly traded brands 📈 💸
• Increased enclosed detection for indoor mall tenants 🏬 🛍

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 55,263,571, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 738,319 places from last month. The net increase is attributed to regular updates of large scale sources and the addition of 53 new brands 🎉.

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

Revamped Category Model

Unlike POIs with a safegraph_brand_idwhere thenaics_code is manually set (more about naics_codes here), SafeGraph utilizes a model to infer naics_codes for "non-branded" POIs globally, and we are VERY excited to announce that our upgraded category model is now in production! This update has been a long time in the making and leverages recent advances in “large language models” (LLMs) plus years of customer feedback bootstrapped as training data. Let's dive into the impact! 💥

• In the November 2024 release, ~12M non-branded POIs have anaics_code change including ~3.6M in the US. While many of these changes are significant corrections, more than half are the result of minor accuracy tweaks or deliberate extensions from 4 digits of naics_code precision to the “full” 6 digits of precision. For example:
  • ~6M/12M (50%) POIs with a naics_code change retained the same first 4 digits (top_category), and ~4.5M of these are extensions from 4 to 6 digits of precision 📏.
  • ~8.4M/12M (70%) POIs with a naics_code change retained the same first 2 digits.

Inferring accurate naics_codes from POI metadata is a perpetual machine learning problem that will never be perfect, but we are very pleased with the net improvements. A special thanks to all the customers who voiced their feedback to help us achieve this update 👏 ! If you have any questions, or if you have additional category feedback, please reach out to your SafeGraph CSM.

Publicly Traded Brands

For each brand in SafeGraph Places, we document additional information in the brand_info file including stock_exchange, stock_symbol, parent_safegraph_brand_id, etc. Some of the brands we've added over the years have experienced significant change events like acquisition, permanent closure, or initial public offering (IPO). All of these events can affect brand_info values, and we were due for an audit. In doing so, we added stock_exchange and stock_symbol values for 345 existing brands that were previously null - across 35 distinct stock_exchanges 📈💸. Expect more of this next month as we put a bow on our audit.

Indoor Mall Tenants

We tell our Geometry customers when a POI is fully enclosed indoors by its parent POI by flagging "true" or "false" in the enclosed column (see docs). This is especially useful for visit attribution customers who may choose to modify or discard mobility signal at fully enclosed POIs. Some parent POIs are more obviously enclosing than others. For example, an airport fully encloses all of its children indoors while a shopping mall (naics_code = 531120) could be an open air strip center or a multi-story, fully enclosing structure. We increased efforts to identify the latter, and 52k POIs in the US and Canada that are children of malls saw their enclosed value flip from "false" to "true."

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 53 brands across 14 countries including:

• I.D.A Pharmacy (SG_BRAND_5c7db22183919645) with 634 POIs 🧑‍⚕️💊
• Delhaize (SG_BRAND_9ef501466a3bc86b) with 358 POIs 🛒🍱
• Texas Oncology (SG_BRAND_1d1720b7f46ea0c8) with 232 POIs 🩺👨‍⚕️
• Best-One Commercial (SG_BRAND_82af610e6e7cc815) with 165 POIs 🚘🔧🛞
• Kincaid Furniture (SG_BRAND_ef6de28f3283bdb9) with 155 POIs 🛋🛏

👀 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 1,851 brands with at least one store closure in September 2024 and 1,883 brands with at least one store opening in September 2024. 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 1,280,002 Placekeys (47,630 branded and 1,232,372 non-branded).