If you’re a QSR brand—or the agency representing one—your success this year won’t come from fresher creative or deeper discounts. It will come from knowing exactly how your customers move in the real world. And for that, you need Cuebiq.
In a landscape defined by signal loss, cookie deprecation, and economic pressure, QSR brands can’t afford to guess. You need clarity—rooted in real-world behavior—and proof that your campaigns are actually driving foot traffic, not just impressions.
Cuebiq delivers that clarity, giving forward-thinking QSR marketers the real-world insight they need to reimagine how they plan, target, and measure campaigns.
QSRs Need Smart Reach and Location Intelligence
The era of generic QSR marketing is over.
According to McKinsey’s State of the Consumer 2024 report, leading consumer brands are moving beyond broad segmentation and toward “smart reach” and microtargeting. Rather than placing consumers in outdated, predefined boxes, they’re using real-world data to identify microsegments with distinct shopping behaviors and preferences.
For QSRs, that means using location intelligence to uncover emerging patterns—like migration to secondary cities, shifting dine-in versus drive-thru preferences, and store proximity to competitors. With these insights, marketers can tailor strategy, messaging, and media spend to match how customers actually behave in the physical world.
The takeaway is clear: QSR location intelligence is a strategic necessity. It enables more relevant targeting, stronger contextual alignment, and measurable lift. Brands that fail to make this shift will keep burning budget on generalized campaigns with limited impact.
Cuebiq gives QSR marketers and their agency partners the tools to act on behavioral insights across digital, mobile, and out-of-home channels—with real-time precision and privacy-compliant data at scale.
Location Intelligence Is QSR’s Competitive Edge
Cuebiq gives QSR marketers real-time, privacy-safe insights into where people go, how often they visit, and what influences their decisions. With this visibility, marketers can:
- Measure real visits—not just exposures or modeled lifts
- Identify loyalty patterns—like how often different customer types visit, how their behavior changes, and how your store compares to nearby competitors
- Optimize in real-time—adjust spend by geography, shift messaging based on dwell time, or double down where foot traffic is trending upward
Cuebiq’s insights come from a robust, 100% opt-in mobile panel—refreshed daily and built to the highest standards of data quality and privacy compliance. This foundation gives QSR marketers the confidence to adjust campaigns while they’re live, knowing the data reflects real behavior in the real world.
Case Study: How A QSR Brand Used Location Intelligence to Optimize Media Spend and Audience Strategy
A leading national QSR brand, working with a top agency partner, partnered with Cuebiq to understand which media partners and audience segments were truly driving in-store visits. Focusing on high-density, diverse markets like Los Angeles and San Diego, the team used Cuebiq’s real-time location intelligence to evaluate campaign performance across partners and audience types.
The impact was clear: every partner delivered positive uplift, with one achieving a 28.5% increase in foot traffic. Another drove a 4.85% visit rate, signaling strong alignment between message, placement, and audience behavior.
Targeting the Hispanic market was especially effective—capturing two of the top three campaign walk-through rates. Meanwhile, general market campaigns delivered the highest volume of incremental visits, helping the brand broaden its reach without sacrificing performance.
With Cuebiq’s measurement tools in place, the team was able to optimize spend in-flight—redirecting budget to top-performing partner and audience combinations. The result was a more efficient, higher-performing campaign strategy built on real-world behavior.
For Agencies and QSRs: Turn Campaigns Into Measurable Impact
In QSR, foot traffic isn’t just a KPI—it is the business. That’s why brands and agencies need more than impressions or CTRs. You need to drive visits, measure true lift, and pivot quickly when performance lags.
- Prove what’s working. Traditional media metrics can’t tell you which ads brought someone through the door. Cuebiq can. Using first-party, privacy-safe mobile data and exposed vs. control methodology, Cuebiq isolates incremental visits—giving you attribution you can trust.
- Reach the right diners. Cuebiq’s audiences are built on actual behavior, not assumptions. Whether you’re targeting habitual coffee drinkers, late-night drive-thru regulars, or customers visiting competitors, you can activate geo-behavioral, branded, or loyalty-based segments across mobile, CTV, and digital out-of-home—with unmatched precision.
- Adjust while it counts. Cuebiq’s dashboard offers real-time visibility into performance—by store, DMA, or region. Track time to visit, dwell time, and distance traveled—and shift spend mid-flight to where it’s driving impact.
In a category where timing and outcomes are everything, Cuebiq helps agencies and QSR brands translate strategy into store traffic—at the speed of the real world.
The Bottom Line
Location intelligence gives QSR marketers a strategic edge: the ability to see which audiences are visiting stores, compare performance across regions, and adjust spend mid-campaign where it matters most. By tying marketing directly to in-store outcomes, location data brings clarity to what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus next. In a category driven by timing, precision, and visibility, that level of insight is what sets leading brands apart.
Want to see what this could do for your QSR brand?
