In this insightful seminar hosted by Dewey Data, Michael Taylor, Product Manager at SafeGraph, offers a deep dive into the capabilities of SafeGraph’s Places and Spend datasets. Tailored for academic researchers and data analysts, the talk demonstrates how this data can help decode complex patterns of consumer behavior, business activity, and local economic shifts. With billions of location and transaction data points across the U.S., SafeGraph provides a uniquely rich, high-resolution view of the real-world economy at the point-of-interest (POI) level.
The Places dataset includes detailed metadata on millions of commercial locations, such as NAICS classifications, hours of operation, brand affiliations, and geographic hierarchies. It is continuously updated and standardized using Placekey—a unique identifier for POIs—making it easy for researchers to harmonize data across disparate sources. This foundational dataset is widely used in applications like urban studies, economic geography, and public policy.
Complementing this is the Spend dataset, which aggregates anonymized debit and credit card transactions at the POI level. Researchers can analyze key metrics such as transaction volumes, average ticket size, in-person vs. online spending, and customer origin trends over time. This opens up opportunities to examine economic resilience, inflationary impacts, consumer confidence, and retail performance across industries and geographies.
Michael also walks through examples of how academic institutions are using these datasets, and how Dewey’s streamlined access tools, schema documentation, and researcher-focused onboarding workflows make it simple to start querying SafeGraph data. This seminar is essential viewing for anyone involved in economic research, location intelligence, or consumer analytics who seeks granular, reliable data on where and how people spend money.