"Fall" into Q4 with a brisk read through our October 2024 release notes! 🍂🧣

Places Highlights

• Concentrated sourcing efforts yield more than half a million new places globally 🌎 🌏
• Narrow category improvements in Europe - a prequel to larger scale improvements next month! 📈
• 35 new brands spanning 42 countries 🎉

Accuracy

SafeGraph evaluates the quality and completeness of our US POI data on a quarterly 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 quarter, we randomly sample two zip codes (one urban and one rural) to measure our accuracy. This month we're looking at:

• 90046: West Hollywood, CA - Representative of Urban
• 05001: White River Junction, VT - 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

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 54,525,252, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net increase of 591,293 places from last month 📈. We on-boarded new sources to meet customer requirements in an array of countries and categories, and the following saw the largest gains:

• France: +81,391 POIs 🇫🇷 including:
  • naics_code like '7225%' (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +58,441 POIs 👩‍🍳 🥖
  • naics_code like '3121%' (Beverage Manufacturing): +13,928 POIs 🍷🍇
  • naics_code like '4452%' (Specialty Food Stores): +7,823 POIs 🍱
• Australia: +65,509 POIs 🇦🇺 including:
  • naics_code like '7225%' (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +31,117 POIs 👩‍🍳 🍤
  • naics_code like '8111%' (Automotive Repair and Maintenance): +8,625 POIs 🚗 🔧
  • naics_code like '4471%' (Gasoline Stations): +8,240 POIs ⛽️
• Germany: +64,205 POIs 🇩🇪 including:
  • naics_code like '7225%' (Restaurants and Other Eating Places): +31,591 POIs 👩‍🍳 🌭
  • naics_code like '4452%' (Specialty Food Stores): +18,994 POIs 🍱
  • naics_code like '4453%' (Beer, Wine, and Liquor Stores): +8,199 POIs 🍺

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

European Category Improvements

For the past several months, we have been fixing especially problematic categories reported across Europe. This has included Casinos, Hospitals, and most recently, Universities. We found that, especially in Sweden 🇸🇪, our data was riddled with POIs classified as Universities (naics_code = 611310) that are not in fact Universities. Ex: In the previous release, we had 808 Swedish POIs classified as naics_code = 611310, but there are only estimated to be a maximum of ~50 Universities in Sweden 😱. After some squinting and source corrections, we now appropriately show 47 Swedish POIs classified as naics_code = 611310 🎓.

A series of narrow corrections is good, but eternally playing catch-up is not a great strategy. To address this, we've been working tirelessly on a better solution for naics_codes at scale. Stay tuned for an announcement about our upgraded category model set to go live in the November 2024 release! Expect widespread naics_code improvements across millions of non-branded POIs globally. 💥

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 35 brands across 42 countries including:

• Athena Bitcoin (SG_BRAND_0cc5d2b6f7cd314c) with 3,138 POIs 💻 🏧
• Mr. DIY (SG_BRAND_5a906743931782bd) with 3,132 POIs 🔨🏡
• Dino (SG_BRAND_3dafefe787529f23) with 2,485 POIs 🛒
• Coinhub ATM (SG_BRAND_e826a86ffa158fe9) with 2,096 POIs 💻 🏧
• Storage Rentals of America (SROA) (SG_BRAND_c5437da63d04599d) with 659 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 1,811 brands with at least one store closure in August 2024 and 1,806 brands with at least one store opening in August 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 226,068 Placekeys (32,290 branded and 193,778 non-branded).