Places Insights: Google Maps Data for More Precise Location Decisions
With Places Insights, Google is opening up location data from over 250 million places for analysis for the first time — providing a strong foundation for location evaluation, site planning, and market observation.
At this year's Cloud Next, Google announced a data milestone: With its new Geospatial Analytics portfolio, the company brings comprehensive geospatial data products directly into BigQuery — enabling large-scale analysis for the first time. Particularly relevant for companies with a local presence, expansion plans, or regional market orientation is Places Insights.
With Places Insights, Google is, for the very first time, enabling the analysis of data from over 250 million places worldwide and allowing it to be combined with a company's own data. As an official Google Cloud Premier Partner, Ubilabs had the opportunity to test the technology in advance and developed the official demo for its launch.
In this article, you’ll learn what Places Insights can do, the challenges it solves, and how you can use it for site planning, competitive analysis, and market observation.
What is Places Insights?
Places Insights is part of the new Geospatial Analytics offering from Google Maps Platform, made available in Google's data warehouse service BigQuery. In addition to Places Insights, the new portfolio includes Road Management Insights, Imagery Insights, and Earth Engine in BigQuery, offering access to Google Maps, Routes, and Earth Engine satellite data.
Within BigQuery's Data Clean Rooms, companies can now, for the first time, securely use Google Places data for analysis and combine it with their own and third-party data — aggregated, privacy-compliant, and ready for immediate insights.
What Makes Places Insights Special?
- Access to location data for over 250 million places worldwide, updated regularly
- Detailed information on opening hours, ratings, accessibility, parking options, price levels, and more
- Ready-to-analyze within BigQuery — no additional software needed
- Use without exposing sensitive company data
Why is this Relevant for Businesses?
The integration of Places Insights into BigQuery opens new potentials for data-driven location decisions — whether in retail, sales, or real estate development. Companies gain a solid foundation for site evaluation, site planning, and market monitoring.
Evaluating Existing Locations
Businesses can analyze their locations in the context of surrounding attractions: How attractive is a hotel location considering the number and quality of nearby restaurants, cafés, or sights? Which location factors impact customer experience? With comprehensive Google Places data for site planning, well-founded evaluations are now possible based on factors like opening hours, ratings, and accessibility.
Targeted Site Planning and White Spot Analysis
Identifying new potential sites becomes much more precise: Where are important service offerings missing? Which areas have good infrastructure but low competition? With access to up-to-date location data, companies can identify white spots and market gaps — essential for expansion and efficient site selection.
Market Monitoring & Competitive Analysis
Using Google Maps data for competitive analysis, companies can track market changes: Where are new competitors opening? Which brands are gaining visibility? Monitoring trends such as business clustering or shifting consumer preferences enables long-term strategic site analysis and more agile market decisions.
Use Cases: How You Benefit from Places Insights
Retail Expansion
- Key Question: Where are expensive restaurants but few premium retailers?
- Benefit: Precise site planning
Real Estate Evaluation
- Key Question: How many leisure activities are available nearby?
- Benefit: Investment attractiveness evaluation
B2B Sales Strategy
- Key Question: Where is there a high density of target industries?
- Benefit: Targeted customer acquisition
Travel & Tourism
- Key Question: Which hotels are near top-rated restaurants and attractions?
- Benefit: Location scoring for offer optimization
Challenges for Businesses — and How Places Insights Solves Them
Location data is crucial, but often hard to use. Many companies face the same issues when trying to make data-driven decisions about new sites, markets, or territories:
- Fragmented data sources: Combining multiple sources often leads to inconsistent quality, coverage, and structure.
- Lack of fresh, global data: Traditional location data is often outdated, geographically limited, or incomplete.
- High manual effort: Preparing reliable location data for analysis is complex, time-consuming, and resource-intensive.
- Privacy challenges: Handling sensitive location data compliantly involves legal and operational risks.
Places Insights addresses these problems — efficiently and securely:
- Consistent global data base: Unified, regularly updated, worldwide data access.
- Compliant and secure: Analysis happens inside BigQuery’s Data Clean Rooms without exposing raw data.
- Minimal preparation required: Data is analysis-ready — no extensive cleaning or transformation needed.
- Flexible integration: Your proprietary location data can be seamlessly combined with Google’s POI datasets for high-precision analysis.
Technology Foundation: BigQuery + Data Clean Rooms
Places Insights shows its full potential when combined with BigQuery, Google’s powerful cloud-based data warehouse. The integration offers several advantages for data-driven location analytics:
- Scalability & Performance: BigQuery processes huge amounts of data quickly — no in-house infrastructure needed.
- Privacy Protection via Data Clean Rooms: Analysis occurs in a secure environment without exposing raw data, ensuring full compliance.
- Seamless Integration: As part of BigQuery’s ecosystem, Places data fits directly into existing workflows, dashboards (e.g., Looker), or machine learning models.
- Up-to-date Data: Google updates Places data monthly, providing reliable insights into opening hours, reviews, and accessibility.
- AI-Ready: Integrated AI tools help predict trends, success factors, and potential growth areas.
- Standardized Data Structure: Unlike many third-party POI sources, Places Insights offers a consistent format, simplifying analytics and saving time.
In short: BigQuery + Places Insights means less effort and faster insights — securely and at scale.
Ubilabs Services For Places Insights
As one of the first partners with access to Places Insights, Ubilabs supports companies from initial strategy to full technical integration:
Our services include:
- Use Case Assessment: Identify the most relevant applications for your business.
- Cloud Onboarding: Set up a Google Cloud landing zone — independent of your current cloud maturity level.
- Data Integration: Transfer your proprietary location data into BigQuery.
- Analytics & Visualization: Conduct spatial analytics, data preparation, and visualization on maps.
- Process Integration: Build automated pipelines for continuous analysis use.
Conclusion: Make Smart Location Decisions with Places Insights & Ubilabs
Places Insights represents a major leap forward in location-based decision-making. By integrating Google Places data for site planning and competitive analysis into BigQuery, companies can act faster, more precisely, and with greater security.
Looking to expand into new markets or optimize your location analysis processes? Now is the time to leverage this new Google technology and integrate Google Places data into your workflows. As an official Google Cloud Premier Partner and pioneer in Location Intelligence, Ubilabs is ready to support you on this journey.
Contact us to find out how you can use Places Insights to achieve your business goals.