Geolancer Campaign Maps 130,000 Retail Locations Across Southeast Asia

Picture of Torsten Sandor

Geolancer, Quadrant’s proprietary platform for manually verifying Points-of-Interest (POIs) on the ground successfully concluded its second beta launch campaign. In five weeks, Geolancers collected over 130,000 POIs across Southeast Asia.

We’ve run the campaign for five weeks between July 7 and August 10 in seven countries and the city of Gurugram (Gurgaon) in India. Geolancers were tasked with mapping as many retail POIs as possible, including restaurants, convenience stores, shops, pharmacies, banks, telecom shops, and more. Because of the stringent Covid restrictions across most of the region, most of the POIs came from two countries, Indonesia and the Philippines. Covid hit these businesses hard, and many of them are closed, rendering existing POI databases outdated.

We started the campaign with three goals in mind: surpassing the numbers of the first campaign, testing new user acquisition channels, and develop quality assurance protocols to serve Quadrant clients with the best available data on the market. We managed to achieve all three of them.

During the first campaign in May-June, we gathered a bit over 50,000 data points in four weeks. The 130,000 collected this time represents a significant increase, while we managed to lower the cost per POI by more than 50 percent.

POIs collected include:

  • 2,347 banks and ATMs
  • 5,623 convenience stores
  • 4,630 telecom shops
  • 41,544 restaurants, bakeries, coffee shops, and other F&B outlets
  • 1,793 courier drop-off and pick-up points, which are essential in intercity trade, especially in Indonesia

Geolancers attached photos to 32 percent of the places, resulting in a truly unique database no one else has in the industry.

Geolancer POI photo
Sample photo of a POI collected by a Geolancer in Bulacan, Philippines

The reduced costs are a result of our new user acquisition strategy. Instead of advertising, we relied exclusively on user referrals, Geolancers inviting friends and family members. This worked spectacularly: by the last week of the campaign, we’ve seen a 250 percent increase in the number of users compared to the starts. Conducting user interviews, we’ve heard first-hand about people inviting their whole family to do Geolancing, creating opportunities in underdeveloped regions.

Lastly, we developed data quality assurance protocols making sure that all attributes of each POIs are accurate. We timed our quarterly company hackathon around the campaign and used a combination of Python, geospatial visualisation with Kepler, and PowerBI to create the necessary algorithms. We've published a separate post about data quality in Geolancer here.

After the two successful beta campaigns, we are preparing for the public release of Geolancer later this month. We plan to do a country-by-country rollout based on commercial interest. We are confident that in the next few months, Geolancer will become the definitive POI data platform in the industry, providing Quadrant customers with authentic, accurate, and up-to-date POI data in the world’s most challenging markets.


Interested in authentic, accurate, and up-to-date POI data? Or, would like to have your existing dataset verified?

Contact our consultants today for on-demand POI data.

 

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