Loyalty in the Real World: Fall 2026
In advertising, real-world behavior is the truest form of intent.
Every visit is a vote for a brand, a place, an experience. Simpli.fi’s Loyalty in the Real World series uses location based ads data and GPS-level foot traffic signals to uncover ad trends in brand loyalty, measuring who is actually winning customers, who is losing them to a competitor down the street, and exactly how much overlap exists between the two. Named brands.
Named brands. Real visits. Nobody knows location better than we do and here’s what it’s telling us.
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Real Loyalty Leaves a Signal
Most loyalty metrics live inside a brand’s own ecosystem. Purchase history, app opens, points redeemed. That data tells you what happened after someone chose you. It doesn’t tell you how often they chose someone else instead.
Loyalty in the Real World works from the outside in. Using GPS-level foot traffic data across 14 million mapped storefronts, each edition measures visit behavior across an entire category, not just for one brand. Sole-visitor share shows which brands hold customers who go nowhere else. Shared-visitor share maps the cross-purchases that happen between direct competitors. Consideration sets show which brands are consistently in the same customer’s rotation.
The result is a loyalty ranking built from real behavior.
See the Latest Research
of burger QSR visitors are loyal
of burger QSR visitors are actively sampling
Everyone has a burger order. The question is whether they have a favorite burger brand. This edition digs into who is actually earning repeat visits in the QSR burger category, which brands are losing customers to the drive-through next door, and how much of the market is still genuinely up for grabs.
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New editions of Loyalty in the Real World drop throughout the year, each one covering a different category and calendar moment. Sign up to be the first to know when the next one lands.
Get Every Edition→The Platform Behind the Research
Every finding in Loyalty in the Real World connects to a capability you can activate in Simpli.fi. Explore the tools that turn loyalty data into real campaigns, real audiences, and real visits.
FAQs: Loyalty in the Real World
Loyalty in the Real World is Simpli.fi’s recurring research series that uses precise, GPS-level foot traffic data and location based ads signals to measure real-world brand loyalty — showing which named brands are winning customers, which are losing them to competitors, and how much customer overlap exists between rivals.
Simpli.fi analyzes anonymized device visits to geofenced storefronts, drawing on roughly 12 billion GPS signals a day connected to 130 million U.S. households and 14 million businesses. A device is counted as loyal to a brand if every visit made within a category falls to that one brand during the study window; a device that visits multiple competing brands is counted as a sampler.
Brand loyalty is measured by how consistently real customers choose one brand over its competitors in the real world, based on where they actually go, not by store traffic volume or media impressions alone.
Loyalty in the Real World is a recurring series, with each edition applying the same methodology to a new category, market, or time window. You can sign up on this page to get each new edition delivered as soon as it publishes.
Location-based ad trends reveal real-world signals like where customers actually go that click and impression data can’t capture. As foot traffic data becomes more central to measurement, it’s shaping the future in advertising by connecting media exposure to real, verifiable in-person behavior.
Find Out Where They're Really Going
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