In April we announced the Preview of Places Insights in BigQuery, enabling you to make informed location decisions such as planning a new store, expanding into a new market, or developing geomarketing campaigns. Today we’re excited to announce Places Insights in BigQuery is now generally available to customers in real estate, retail, travel, public sector and more.
The Places Insights datasets empower businesses to make smarter and faster decisions by leveraging Google’s rich Places data directly within BigQuery. Imagine securely joining Google’s deep understanding of local neighborhoods with your own business data to get a complete, actionable picture of your market. See how it works in this demo.
What can Places Insights do for you?
In today's competitive landscape, understanding location is crucial for strategic growth. Traditional methods often involve grappling with inconsistent data from multiple sources, struggling with outdated or incomplete information, and spending valuable time just preparing data for analysis. Places Insights in BigQuery addresses these challenges head-on by providing aggregated insights for your analysis.
It brings together Google’s rich Places data—including detailed aggregated information about businesses, landmarks and points of interest, based on attributes like business hours, place types, price level and user ratings—with the robust analytical capabilities of Google Cloud’s BigQuery for statistical analysis. This means you can:
Access the freshest, most comprehensive Places data
Utilize Google's accurate and comprehensive dataset of over 250 million places worldwide that is refreshed on a monthly basis to capture the dynamic nature of physical places. Analyze over 300 place types and nearly 70 attributes—to understand the nuanced characteristics of any location.
We invest Google-scale resources to keep our POI data accurate and up to date, leveraging 1000s of data partnerships, user generated content, reviews and photos, information submitted directly by business owners and AI analysis of our Street View and satellite imagery to validate and standardize our POI data into an analysis ready dataset.
Work in a secure environment
Securely combine your proprietary data with Google's Places data in a privacy-preserving environment within BigQuery, allowing you to run analysis without ever exposing sensitive information.
Leverage familiar tools
Use familiar tools by bringing statistical analysis of Google’s aggregated data directly in your existing BQ environment, and take advantage of tools like BigQuery ML, Vertex AI and Looker.
How Places Insights is driving impact
Organizations are already using Places Insights to make smarter and better business decisions.
Lepton Software, a geospatial solutions company based in India, is using Places Insights to make better decisions about new site selections.
Integrating Places Insights with Smart Market enables our customers to access global POI coverage and rich attributes—ratings, accessibility and operating hours. Our tool translates that into faster shortlists and sharper trade-area analysis. Customers cut field-scouting costs, make better new-site decisions, and expand confidently across markets worldwide, realizing rapid ROI with consistent growth. Lepton Software
Places Insights integrated into Lepton Software’s Smart Market solution
Global Earthquake Model Foundation, a non-profit organization, is using Places Insights to help plan and respond to disasters.
Knowing where critical assets such as healthcare facilities or educational buildings are spatially distributed is essential for planning and responding to disasters. Places Insights is a game changer for organizations like the Global Earthquake Model Foundation that has the remit to calculate and communicate earthquake risk. Global Earthquake Model Foundation
Onigroup, a global geospatial solutions company, is using Places Insights to augment the design & planning of new residential developments.
Understanding POI infrastructure is core to building new cities. We have worked extensively in the Middle East using Places Insights to augment the design & planning of new residential developments (even in entirely new cities) based on understanding existing POI infrastructure, gaps & what new links from retail to transportation need to be built. This saves enormous planning costs by removing complex manual surveys. Global Head of Partnerships, OniGroup
CARTO, a global location intelligence company, is using Places Insights to help predict variables like retail revenue and product success.
CARTO uses Places Insights to enrich our geospatial models, enabling us to predict variables like retail revenue and product success. Its availability in BigQuery makes the service incredibly scalable, allowing our clients to analyze massive datasets with very granular detail. This is particularly valuable for markets such as retail, CPG, and restaurant chains, where understanding location data is the key to drive business growth and expansion plans. Global Director of Solutions Engineering, CARTO
Persistent, a geospatial solutions company based in India, uses Places Insights to help their clients make more informed, data-driven decisions.
Our team has found Places Insights to be a substantial advancement in geospatial analytics. Its provision of aggregated, location-based intelligence—such as place density, ratings, and operational trends—can empower our clients to make more informed, data-driven decisions. The ability to precisely filter and group data is powerful for understanding consumer behavior and competitive landscapes. The seamless integration with BigQuery and flexible filtering capabilities further underscore its value, reflecting Google’s ongoing commitment to innovation and developer-centric design. Solutions Expert, Persistent
Unlocking strategic decisions: Key use cases for your business
With Places Insights in BigQuery, you can gain a powerful lens into the physical world, enabling a wide range of strategic applications, including:
Location performance analysis: Optimize what you have
Ever wonder why some of your locations perform better than others? Places Insights provides statistical data to help you understand the underlying geospatial characteristics and how they correlate to sales performance and property values, enabling you to make better decisions:
Correlation with performance: For instance, a hotel chain can run a query to count the number of restaurants, bars and tourist attractions within a 1km radius of each of their hotel locations. They may find that their most successful hotels are surrounded by a high density of highly-rated and moderately-priced restaurants which they can use to inform strategic decisions such as tailoring their marketing to highlight the vibrant local dining scene for specific hotel locations.
Site selection: Find your next best location
Deciding where to open a new store, build a distribution center, or place a cell tower is a monumental decision. Places Insights helps you pinpoint the optimal location by:
Identifying high-potential markets: Understand the concentration of complementary and competitive businesses, combined with your own or third-party data (like census information) to narrow down markets with the most promise. For example, an EV charging company may query for the density of grocery stores, coffee shops, and shopping centers to prioritize prospective charging sites that will have sufficient nearby amenities for their customers while they charge their car.
Developing custom suitability scores: Create tailored models based on your unique business needs, factoring in the density of complementary businesses, nearby amenities, and more, to make it easy to quantify and compare the suitability of different locations.
Visualizing hotspots: Quickly identify promising locations using interactive heat maps, giving you an immediate visual understanding of potential opportunities and underserved areas.
Geomarketing & advertising: Make your marketing spend more effective
Improve the efficiency of your marketing spend by deeply understanding the character of a location:
Tailor your marketing: Use insights into nearby amenities and businesses to customize your advertisements and marketing campaigns based on the character of a location, so you can ensure your message resonates with the right audience at the right place. For instance a grocery delivery service may edit their ad copy to focus on its ‘organic and local’ produce in areas where there are high density of wellness centers and yoga studios.
Media strategy: You can also use local insights on concentration of certain types of businesses to inform your media strategy. For instance, a sporting goods store could focus their digital and physical advertising in areas with a high concentration of gyms, parks, and hiking areas, knowing they are reaching a fitness-conscious audience.
Market research & competitive benchmarking: Know your landscape
Understanding the competitive landscape and market potential is vital for growth. Places Insights allows you to:
Quantify and profile any market: Generate a deep understanding of a market's composition, including the density of various business types and key brands, creating a unique "commercial fingerprint" for any location.
Visualize the competitive landscape: Move beyond simple lists to dynamic heatmaps of competitor concentrations, revealing geographic strongholds, market penetration, and "white space" opportunities.
Benchmark on attribute-level analysis: Compare your offerings against competitors based on crucial operational attributes like delivery services, accessibility, opening hours, and average customer ratings, so that you can identify gaps in the market to be filled.
Ready to explore the power of Places Insights?
Fill out this form and we will reach out to you to learn more about your use case and how Places Insights can help you. You can also dive deeper by visiting our documentation page to explore the technical capabilities and learn more about how Places Insights works.
