The quality of Point of Interest (POI) data is an important attribute to assess as it should provide powerful information to drive great business strategies. But what defines a good quality POI dataset? There are three important pillars of what entails a good POI dataset. These include:

• Recency
• Accuracy
• Scale

Truth be told, an ideal POI dataset should constantly evolve as our physical world changes every day. In 2020, thousands of businesses shut down in multiple countries, which resulted in millions of out-of-date POIs worldwide. To push leading-edge decision-making with this kind of data, companies like yours need to focus on leveraging a top scale of points of interest, as well as ensuring the recency and precision of datasets.To assess the quality of POI data, companies have to run through the following factors:

Updated POIs (Points of Interest)

Premium POI data should not only keep track of closed locations but should also include new businesses, neighborhood expansions, new governmental and administrative facilities, and enrich all of the corresponding attributes for old and new POIs.

Precision and accuracy of location data

Accurate POI data entails making sure that locations do not duplicate nor do they include incorrect or outdated information for each of their attributes. Using incorrect information can lead to revenue losses or poor decision-making.

Ability to cross-reference data

According to Google, over 90 businesses change every hour (whether that means that they changed their name, location, size, contact information etc. or even shut down). This makes it challenging for any POI data provider to keep up to date with all the changes on an hourly basis. Multi-sourced data can be a great solution to obtain the most accurate and up-to-date information. To do so, it is important that the data that they leverage can be cross-referenced with multiple sources to enrich your scale of POIs and their corresponding information. It is also important to consider if you can request customisable datasets to fit all your requirements; you wouldn’t want to waste your time analysing information in vain.

Understand the collection method and get the right scale

In 2020, the U.S. government registered over 31M businesses operating around the country. To ensure that you get the right points of interest you should evaluate the way a provider collects the data and whether it covers interesting areas for your business.

Testing data samples before engaging on bigger projects

Don’t hesitate to request data samples to test how useful the information can be for your business. For many providers, this is a common method of evaluating just how valuable their datasets can prove to be, so make use of that to help you decide on which provider is right now. A few tips you could use while selecting data samples are:

• Assessing the data at a neighbourhood or city level to check for density.
• Checking a couple of brands per category on a nation-level to see the coverage per brand/category. Does the data match the statistics that these stores have online?

To sum up

The potential of POI data is unveiled when we look at several use cases it offers businesses across various verticals. Whether you are keen on doing a competitive analysis, selecting a new retail site, or are looking to improve your delivery systems and enhance public access systems – an accurate and well-updated POI dataset solves the challenge. Your choice of POI data in summation can influence the growth and revenue of your business. For this reason, your POI datasets should be multi-sourced, frequently updated, standardised, and regularly cleansed to help you make informed business decisions and moves.