Geofencing brought almost 1,400 diners to Dave’s Hot Chicken in a month

The chain wanted consistent foot traffic at specific locations in key markets, from new customers as well as regulars. Impressions and clicks weren’t the goal. Diners walking through the door were.

The campaign layered geography and behavior: a five-mile proximity radius around each restaurant, retail block targeting, neighborhood targeting, GroundTruth’s own behavioral audiences and third-party audiences, delivered across mobile and social placements. Success was measured in visits, which GroundTruth attributes by observing a device at the location after it saw the ad.

GroundTruth reports that the month-long campaign drove almost 1,400 diners to the restaurants, that 75% came from new or infrequent visitors with the remaining 25% from moderate to high-frequency visitors, and that the campaign yielded a 2X return on ad spend and a 7.8% average increase in sales. The page doesn’t describe how the sales lift was isolated (a control group or matched market), and it doesn’t say how many locations ran, so treat the sales figure as vendor-reported.

Reaching people near the stores who weren’t already regulars is the whole game for a restaurant. Proximity and neighborhood targeting found them, behavioral audiences filtered for likely diners, and visit measurement kept the campaign honest about what it produced.

GroundTruth reports that Tandy Leather, a leathercraft supply retailer, ran a campaign for eight stores (case published July 2026): 2.08 million impressions produced 1,400 visits at $7.02 per visit, with the mobile ads delivering an 89% incremental visit rate and 61% of visitors arriving within 24 hours. On-premise targeting (people already at or near the store) delivered the cheapest visits at $2.35 each. In a case GroundTruth published with Alpha Media, Sharp Auto, a single dealership, targeted shoppers seen at a list of 22 locations plus camping sites and boat dealers, and drove 17 lot visits at $24.68 each over a little more than two months, with a 1.28% click-through rate on dynamic video. Seventeen visits sounds small until you price a car sale against $25 a visit. And the famous version: Burger King’s 2018 Whopper Detour offered a one-cent Whopper to anyone within 600 feet of a McDonald’s, and the parent company’s CEO told investors it produced 1.5 million app downloads.