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September-2024 Release Notes

4 months ago by [email protected]

Welcome home summer holiday-goers! Ease back into the swing of things with a quick read through our September 2024 release notes 📝 .

Places Highlights

  • Improved categories in Europe 🌎
  • Targeted rich attribute fixes in the US 🎯
  • 87 new brands across 145 countries 🎉

Places Growth

This month, SG Places has a grand total of 53,933,959, including POI with or without geometry, closed POI, and parking lots. This is a net decrease of 136,584 places from last month. The net decrease is attributed to the removal of some stale, low value sources in Russia that are no longer pertinent.

European Category Improvements

If you kept up with our release notes this summer, European coverage gains was an obvious theme. We added more than 800k new places across Europe in just 3 months, and while we're proud of these efforts, we noticed our naics_code accuracy for restaurants took a hit. This month, we focused on fine tuning our naics_codes for all the recently added European places, and the following categories saw the largest toggles compared to last month:

  • 117,188 POIs moved from naics_code = 7121 (Museums, Historical Sites, and Similar Institutions) ➡️ naics_code = 722511 (Full-Service Restaurants) 🍜🥗
  • 93,708 POIs moved from naics_code = 7225 (Restaurants and Other Eating Places) ➡️ naics_code = 722511 (Full-Service Restaurants) 🍜🥗
  • 18,592 POIs moved from naics_code = 7121 (Museums, Historical Sites, and Similar Institutions) ➡️ naics_code = 722515 (Snack and Nonalcoholic Beverage Bars) 🍪 ☕️

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

US Rich Attribute Fixes 🛠

We LOVE that our customers are increasingly finding value in our rich attributes stack! 🎉 Many of these columns are built for specific use cases that enable narrower search queries, aggregation queries, or enable unique joins to other datasets 🤓. The following attributes were air brushed after some pointed feedback (focused primarily in the US).

category_tags

category_tags are often used to isolate POIs by granular characteristics beyond what can be found in the naics_code descriptions (top_category and sub_category). New category_tags are always in demand, and this month, we increased our category_tag fill rate in the US by nearly 4 percentage points (from 44.6% to 48.4%) 📈. The category_tag with the largest increase is "ATMs" (assigned to +270k US POIs) 🏧.

open_hours

open_hours display when the POI is open for business or for general use each day of the week 🕰. Keeping open_hours up to date can be challenging as some POIs experience seasonality or adjust based on economic conditions. While we only moved the needle on US fill rate by <1% this month, we introduced a flurry of additional checks to ensure we mitigate obvious errors and better vet slight changes moving forward. Aldi (SG_BRAND_41267d9fb3826d417e32077a3b0a35e5) and Dillard's(SG_BRAND_373ffceb51a02e693129fdb75074bd37) are two notable brands with improved open_hours this month.

store_id

store_id is the unique ID associated with a store as provided and maintained by the store/brand itself. This attribute is especially serviceable as join key when working with transaction data - which typically contains the store_id along with otherwise messy name and address strings. Over the past two months, we collaborated with a few of our transaction enrichment customers to correct store_id values for more than 30 brands including:

  • Sonic (SG_BRAND_bb5459bf19132d4dc1340654c17331df)
  • Papa John's (SG_BRAND_2bc3b742e1d5eb8993fb301179f1700b)
  • Del Taco (SG_BRAND_22445dbfa062276fb029fe9b9262b9ed)
  • McAlister's Deli (SG_BRAND_a7b1ab4c6661237b2868db054a99f47f)
  • Claire's (SG_BRAND_773253c441b75634)

Brands

This month, we added a grand total of 87 brands across 145 countries including:

  • VFW (Veterans of Foreign Wars) (SG_BRAND_b37bfce421a22cada40ef13751fcb3dd) with 3,507 POIs 🇺🇸
  • Good Neighbor Pharmacy (SG_BRAND_489fb1b9a7b41a12f4c73729e4c6d9a2) with 2,369 POIs 🧑‍⚕️💊
  • Publix Liquor Stores (SG_BRAND_aeb7d0ab03348abe) with 370 POIs 🍺
  • Factory Motor Parts (SG_BRAND_0864e822a4d7c584) with 283 POIs 🛞
  • The Spot Barbershop (SG_BRAND_503954aa5f3613f3) with 28 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 1,836 brands with at least one store closure in July 2024 and 1,877 brands with at least one store opening in July 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 472,164 Placekeys (57,112 branded and 415,052 non-branded).