At Foursquare, we are committed to delivering geospatial data to our customers via their preferred methods, formats, and environments, all at the speed of business.
We pride ourselves on providing the highest quality and most up-to-date location data available. However, we know that having the freshest location data in the market is only valuable to our customers if that data is also delivered in a prompt manner.
Timely geospatial data is critical to business success across a variety of different use cases.
For example:
- Identifying newly opened venues quickly helps sales teams be the first to market, gaining a competitive edge
- Properly indicating which venues have closed ensures an optimal user experience, reducing friction and customer churn
- Building and activating location-driven audiences based on fresh behavioral data empowers marketers to launch time-sensitive campaigns
Foursquare continually invests in backend systems to ensure that location data is delivered fast. In particular, our delivery data platform team is focused on providing key capabilities to other internal engineers, so that data is successfully delivered to customers as quickly and efficiently as possible. This team is constantly improving our proprietary delivery infrastructure, internally known as the Data Manifest System, which gives Foursquare’s data teams an interface to specify the data they want to deliver and where, plus it offers the ability to schedule and deploy these datasets to various channels. The team focuses on building data deployment integration software, which we call deployers, to expand the availability of Foursquare datasets in various channels.
Here are some recent improvements the team has made in order to execute on the promise of timely data deliveries to customers:
Invalid/Error Deployment Notification
A proactive notification mechanism alerts internal stakeholders when a data deployment task is misconfigured or fails due to system errors. With a consistent and instantaneous way of identifying when and why deployments have failed, any issue can be resolved in a timely manner.
SFTP, GCP, & S3 Integrations
Foursquare supports SFTP, GCP, and S3 data delivery in a standardized fashion through the Data Manifest System. This means all deliveries are configured through standard tools and UIs in a single internal platform, rather than requiring data engineers to write their own integration code. This enhances delivery support for our customers by providing:
- Faster turnaround times for setting up SFTP, GCP, and/or S3 delivery
- The ability to receive data deliveries via SFTP, GCP, and/or S3 at a more regular cadence (i.e. daily vs. weekly/monthly), no longer requiring manual engineering work to monitor and maintain
- More proactive identification of delivery misconfigurations and faster resolution for such errors based on improved monitoring and alerting systems now integrated as common platform features
Offline Conversion Feed Integrations
Foursquare delivers store visitation data directly into ad-tech platforms such as The Trade Desk and Google, allowing marketers to measure campaign performance and make optimizations within the platform itself. The team has moved these deliveries into the Data Manifest system to enable a single system for all deliveries. This allows for improved monitoring via internal dashboards that can track deliveries and statistics, making delivery data more visible to internal teams for proactive communication and troubleshooting purposes.
While moving delivery to the advertising platform Amobee under this system, Foursquare was also able to update the integration to deliver more value to both Amobee and marketers running campaigns. With the most recent update, Foursquare data is now delivered to two API endpoints – one builds a dashboard for analyzing campaign attribution, and one that utilizes an AI algorithm for automatic campaign optimization, allowing marketers to take advantage of both simultaneously.
As the leading geospatial data platform, Foursquare strives to consistently innovate and invest in ensuring successful, timely, and efficient data deliveries that power confident business decisions through reliably superior consumer experiences.
