Measuring QSR Traffic

The Problem

Most restaurant brands run digital ads. Most of them can’t tell you if those ads actually brought anyone through the door.

That’s not a knock, it’s just where the industry has been for a long time. Impression counts, click-through rates, estimated reach. Metrics that describe what happened on a screen, not what happened in the real world.

When a regional restaurant chain came to us, this was their exact situation. They were spending on ads. Traffic looked fine. But they couldn’t connect an impression to a visit, couldn’t justify the channel to leadership, and had no way to know which part of the campaign was actually working.

They’d tried QR codes. Discount offers. Organic social posts. None of it gave them a clear line between an ad and a body walking through the door.

What We Did

We launched a programmatic campaign through Proximity, Klever’s location intelligence platform, with one job: tie digital ad exposure to real, verified in-store visits.

Proximity identified and reached audiences based on verified real-world movement data, people who actually visit similar locations. Display and mobile ads ran across channels, optimized throughout the flight. Every impression was matched against actual store visits, tracked through Proximity.

Not estimated. Not modeled. Actual visits.

What Happened

In the first two weeks: 500 tracked store visits. By the end of month one, that number was over 2,600. Cost per verified visit: $4.69.

A verified visit means someone saw the ad and walked into the restaurant. Not someone who clicked. Not someone who “engaged.” Someone who showed up.

For a brand that had been relying on QR codes and gut feeling, $4.69 per verified visit wasn’t just a good number. It was the first number they could actually take to leadership.

When you can prove the channel works, you’re not defending your budget in the next meeting, you’re asking for more of it. The conversation changes entirely.

Why It Matters

The gap between digital advertising and real-world results has always existed. What’s changed is our ability to close it.

Proximity doesn’t estimate whether an ad drove a visit. It tracks real device movement, before, during, and after a campaign, and matches exposure to outcome.

For industries where physical presence is the whole point, restaurants, retail, healthcare, entertainment, that’s what makes the channel defensible, scalable, and worth investing in.

The question was never “are our ads running?” It was “are our ads working?” Those are different questions. Now there’s an answer to the second one.

Up Next

This is the first in a series of real results from campaigns across industries. No client names, but the numbers are real, and so are the problems they solved.

Next: a lottery brand that needed to move product in a specific region. The targeting approach that drove a 28% sales lift.

If you're spending on ads without knowing what they're driving, that's the conversation we should be having.

Back To Index