Hi, I want to ask two questions about the “what part” and “where part” in placekey. I found that there are two formats of “what part”, 3-digits and 6-digits. And I want know which one is unique if we want to identify a company and find out its daily visit. Could you identify two companies if there are right next door to each other? If not, in what kind of situation can you distinguish two companies if they have the same 3-digits “what part”.
Another question is that in some cases, if I (1) only use address info; (2) use address info + company name, I will get placekeys with different “where part” in these two situations. And I calculate the distance of the two “where part” placekeys, the mean is 203 meters, the median is 134 meters, and the max one is 9km. Could you please tell me why this happens and which one should I choose to merge with Patterns data?
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Hey ! The What part of a Placekey is split into two triplets (for example: 223-227) where the first triplet is a serial index of an address located in the Where part of the Placekey, and the second triplet is a serial index of POIs located at that address. These are referred to as the address encoding, and POI encoding, respectively.
The POI encoding is optional, while the address encoding will always be present if the Placekey has a What part. If the POI does not have an actual address (like some parks or monuments), the address encoding will be “zzz”. What parts are only unique up to the Where part of a Placekey. You should be able to identify two companies as unique Placekeys even if they are right next to each other.
If I understand your second question correctly, you’re getting different Placekeys from Match when you use only address versus address info + company name. As Match relies most heavily on name and address, I’d recommend using the Placekey you get using name and address.