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October-2021 Release Notes

about 3 years ago by [email protected]

Welcome to the spooky, pumpkin-spiced October 2021 release notes. 🍂 👻 (2021-09-29/1632881892 shipped 2021-10-05).

Highlights

  • Release of SafeGraph Global Brands 🌎! Now available for over 100k branded POIs belonging to over 500 brands (growing every month!) with locations in 192 countries around the world.
  • Nearly 300k new transit POIs
  • Over 65k new apartment and multi-family housing POIs
  • 90 new brands 📈
  • SafeGraph officially passes 10mm POIs! 🎉 🎊

Table of Contents:

Core Places and Brands

Enhancements - Core Places and Brands

  • SafeGraph has gone global 🌎 🌍 🌏! We are very excited to announce the release of Global Brands. Global Brands provides the same base business listing information for over 100k branded POIs belonging to over 500 brands with locations around the world, using the same schema as our Core Places dataset, including attributes such as address, lat/long, category, and opened_on/closed_on dates.
  • Our coverage of global branded locations is growing rapidly, and we are adding new POIs and brands every month. To see our brand and country coverage, please see the Global Brands Summary Statistics page.
  • 👀 Are we missing a brand or country? 👀 Please let us know here! We are adding hundreds of new brands across all countries every month, and we prioritize our brand queue based on your feedback.
  • Last month SG Places had 9,946,995 points-of-interest (including closed POIs). This month SG Places has 10,387,679 points-of-interest (including point POIs). These are 235,006 US Places, 171,092 CA places , and 34,586 GB places, totaling a net increase of 440,684 places.
  • We've added 90 brands (+58 🇺🇸, +13 🇨🇦, +27 🇬🇧) - view the full list here! Below are some highlights:
    • LibertyX Bitcoin ATM (SG_BRAND_47517c67494b7680) with 20,126 POI
    • Walmart Vision Center (SG_BRAND_7ab56c229adc1115) with 4,765 POI
    • Walmart Fuel Station (SG_BRAND_22773d0cb74a9e9f) with 394 POI
    • 12 Full-Service Restaurants (722511)
    • 9 Furniture Stores (442110)
    • 7 Limited-Service Restaurants (722513)

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.

Enhancements - Categories

This month, key changes include:

  • +349k new point POIs, including transit stops 🚏 (4851), ATMs (522110, 522320), and EV charging stations (447190)
  • +312k Transit POIs (+145k 🇺🇸, +137k 🇨🇦, +30k 🇬🇧)
  • +12k 🇺🇸 EV Charging POIs
  • +20k 🇺🇸 ATM POIs
  • +65k new apartment and other multi-family housing POIs (531110)
  • +26k 🇺🇸, +40k 🇨🇦

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 38,857 Placekeys (8,148 branded and 30,709 non-branded). To keep track of the status, predecessors, and latest successor of each Placekey, you can try using the Lineage API.

Geometry

Enhancements - Geometry

  • While OWNED polygons are preferred, it does not mean that SHARED polygons are inherently bad. It only means that the exact shape of each POI within the polygon is not discernible, but the general location can be identified by the centroid (latitude & longitude). 🎯
  • When enclosed = FALSE, it indicates that there are reasonable means to derive a unique polygon for the POI (even when parent_placekey is not null), and we strive for 100% of branded, non-enclosed POIs to have polygon_class = "OWNED_POLYGON."
  • Last month, the percent OWNED polygons for branded, non-enclosed POIs was 78.2%
  • This month, the percent OWNED polygons for branded, non-enclosed POIs is 77.8%

Bug Fixes and Known Issues - Geometry

  • Centroid-Radius Polygons -- We internally track centroid-radius polygons vs precise polygons and strive for 100% precise polygons. You can measure this yourself using the is_synthetic column.

Patterns

Enhancements - Patterns

  • In last month's delivery, SG Monthly Patterns had 4,610,349 points-of-interest (US only). This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 4,662,583 points-of-interest (net 52,234).
  • Last month, SG Monthly Patterns had 1,076,756,291 visits from 36,401,129 visitors. This month, SG Monthly Patterns has 1,069,966,017 visits from 35,246,173 visitors (delta -6,790,274 visits, -1,154,956 visitors).
  • In our Neighborhood Patterns product, which provides more generalized foot traffic flows across census block groups. In the US we have:
    • 2,161,532,460 raw stops (+15,278,614 from last month)
    • 407,851,438 raw devices (-19,823,359 from last month)
  • Neighborhood Patterns is available in Canada! 🇨🇦 Contact your CSM to learn more or add to your subscription. In CA we have:
    • 42,899,609 raw stops (-172,619 from last month)
    • 9,485,564 raw devices (-1,098,041 from last month)

Bug Fixes and Known Issues - Patterns

  • Corrected a bug that caused visits to large Golf Courses and Country Clubs (naics_code=713910) and Amusement and Theme Parks (naics_code=713110) to be inflated between April and August 2021, inclusive, including data in the July 2021 backfill. This affected ~17k POIs in Patterns (0.3%). Note that visitors were not affected, just visits.

SafeGraph Shop

New Data Available

  • Apartment POIs
  • New datasets by Netwise

Enhancements

  • Flag large carts for possible enterprise discounts
  • Advanced filtering options
    • Toggle easily between Brands & Categories
    • Include permanently closed places
  • New 'Feedback' page for providing suggestions to the shop team here at SafeGraph

Bugs Fixed and Known Issues

  • Fixed issue with schema column order in some dataset previews
  • Fixed issue with file name for some downloads
  • Fixed issue with losing filters when toggling between Brands & Categories

Coming later in October

  • Point POI records in Core Places (ATMs, EV Chargers, and Transit Stops)
  • Faster checkout. Don't worry about creating an account first.
  • Searching for a brand or category and can't find it? Easily request missing brands or categories
Interested in global POI coverage? Reach out to your customer success manager to learn more about how we're thinking about growing coverage internationally. 🌎 

**In case you missed it,** check out [last month's release notes](https://docs.safegraph.com/changelog/september-2021-release-notes). 📝