Market Research Meets Reality: How Verified Spend Data is Transforming Restaurant Decision-Making
Your dashboards say sales are stable. Your brand tracker shows consistent awareness. Your surveys confirm loyal guests. And yet, a competitor just took your share – but you won’t see it until it’s too late (likely next quarter).
That’s not a failure of your research team. It’s a failure of true consumer visibility.
In today’s consumer economy, insights leaders across data analytics, corporate strategy, and competitive intelligence face a shared challenge: they’re expected to make faster, higher-stakes decisions in markets that move faster than the data they rely on.
Traditional research still plays an essential role. But when it comes to validating what’s actually happening in near real-time, the smartest organizations are adding a new layer to their data intelligence stack: verified consumer transaction data.
A Leading QSR Grows Mobile Share and Cross-Shop Retention with Channel Insights
A leading U.S. quick-service restaurant (QSR) chain wanted to understand how guests were engaging across in-store, mobile ordering, and delivery apps. On the surface, overall sales were growing steadily, and drive-thru throughput (which was once a major competitive advantage) remained strong – but mobile adoption lagged targets. Only 12% of transactions were coming through mobile ordering, compared to 20%+ at leading peers like Chick-fil-A and McDonald’s.
That’s where Facteus came in. Using real-world credit and debit transaction data, the QSR gained a clear view of guest behavior across all their channels – and their competitors’. The data revealed two critical insights:
- Cross-shopping was rampant: 42% of its mobile customers also ordered from competitors’ mobile apps within the same month – highlighting a growing dependence on mobile order-ahead across the industry.
- 3P delivery reliance was surging: customers were placing nearly 18% of total orders through DoorDash and Uber Eats, compared to just ~10% for its top competitors. This signaled that convenience and frictionless experiences were becoming a major decision driver – and the brand was missing an opportunity to own that relationship directly through its own app.
Using this data, alongside other research, the brand redesigned its mobile experience, channel strategy, and marketing mix. It piloted “skip” lanes and curbside pickup for mobile pre-orders in select markets and launched a targeted app reactivation campaign aimed at lapsed loyalty users who frequently visited rival QSRs. The team also fine-tuned digital offers by metro, focusing on high cross-shop overlap zones where wallet share was at risk.
Within six months, mobile order volume grew 38%, while delivery app share declined from 18% to 13% – signaling healthier omnichannel balance and a stronger direct relationship with guests via their own app. In markets where cross-shop promotions were tested, retained wallet share rose 9%.
Today, Facteus data continues to help the brand monitor its channel mix, identify new digital growth markets, and measure competitive wallet shifts – turning channel visibility into a sustained advantage in the ever-evolving QSR landscape.
Traditional Research Shows the “Why.” Spend Data Reveals the “What”, “When” and “Where.”
For decades, surveys, focus groups, and panels have been the backbone of market understanding – uncovering consumer attitudes, motivations, and intent. But every method has blind spots:
- Surveys show what people say they’ll do but miss what they actually do.
- Location data reveals where consumers go, but not how much they spend.
- Brand trackers measure sentiment, but not whether it converts to wallet share.
- Receipt panels capture spend but lack real-time speed and inadvertently miss trips.
These tools remain essential for uncovering context and causation, but they can’t always keep up with reality. They often come with significant lead times, lack confidence due to fraud or other bias, and leave major gaps in understanding true consumer behavior.
That’s where verified consumer spend data steps in. By connecting real, anonymized transaction data to ongoing research, companies can validate hypotheses, quantify emerging behaviors, and identify competitive shifts as they happen.
Introducing the New Way of True Market Validation
Facteus collects and aggregates real, anonymized, regulatory compliant transaction data from more than 180 million credit and debit cards across the United States. This dataset captures near real-time consumer activity across virtually every retailer, restaurant, and direct-to-consumer brand.
The result: a verified, representative view of how Americans are actually spending – not inferred, surveyed, or biased – but proven through real transactions.
Facteus’ data is:
- Verified: Drawn from real transactions, not claimed or inferred purchase behavior
- Representative: Covering all income levels, demographic tiers, and geographies
- Fast: Updated daily – not weekly, monthly or quarterly
- Granular: Viewable by named competitors, channel, location, or daypart
This level of visibility transforms how strategy and analytics teams can confirm trends, measure competitive shifts, and optimize their strategies across their business.
From Insight to Validation: A Smarter Decision Loop
In the new intelligence ecosystem, the most effective organizations use spend data to complement their research, not compete with it. And they do it across teams.
- Corporate Strategy Teams use it to validate growth assumptions before major investments.
- Data Analytics Teams use it to create and test models based on verified spend patterns.
- Competitive Intelligence Teams use it to quantify shifts in wallet share and detect early signs of market disruption.
- Consumer Insights Teams use it to link awareness and preference data to actual purchase behavior.
When these groups align around a shared dataset, they gain what traditional reporting can’t offer alone: a closed loop between what consumers intend, what they claim, and what they actually do.
The New Gold Standard for Decision Confidence
The use of verified transaction data doesn’t just accelerate insights – it strengthens them at every level. Deeper visibility into true consumer behavior across competitors and channels enables:
- Faster validation: Test and confirm hypotheses in days, not months
- Deeper accuracy: Ground forecasts and narratives in real-world behavior
- Greater credibility: Support strategic decisions with evidence that’s verified and representative of the full U.S. population
The Future of Real Insights Is Rooted in Real Transactions
You’ve heard the term “voice of the consumer” when it comes to consumer insights, but access to real-world spend data goes beyond their “voice”. It’s the echo of their wallets. Putting their money where their mouth is, so to speak – objective, inclusive, and impossible to bias.
It creates a new foundation for decision-making for retailers, restaurants, c-stores and consumer brands: understanding not just why consumers behave the way they do, but how that behavior shows up in the market in real dollars.
Facteus gives data and strategy leaders the ability to connect the dots across research, analytics, and competitive intelligence – all built on the confidence of verified consumer transactions.
Too often, retailers, QSRs and brands are late to market with their strategic moves due to delays in data and gaps in visibility. Now you can get easy access to make decisions based on what consumers actually did last week, not what they said last month.
Get a 30-minute look at your competitors’ sales and category trends at Facteus.com.
