Dive Brief:

• IHOP, the fast-casual chain with 1,650 restaurants worldwide, nearly doubled its foot traffic at its "Pancake with a Purpose" fundraiser on March 7, which the chain has promoted as National Pancake Day, according to data from PlaceIQ made available to Mobile Marketer.
• The promotion offered a free stack of pancakes to customers in exchange for a donation to the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and Shriners Hospitals for Children. The chain sought to raise $3.5 million dollars for the health organizations but did not report this year's results.
• The promotion received an 89% boost in foot traffic from a week earlier, according to the data by PlaceIQ, which uses mobile location information to see how audiences respond to advertising.

Dive Insight:

PlaceIQ observed a big spike in foot traffic for IHOP’s free pancake charity drive, but the effects were short-lived. Foot traffic patterns over the longer term didn’t deviate much from prior trends, the mobile location firm found.

PlaceIQ's findings are interesting because they show how mobile location data might be leveraged by marketers to help determine the return on investment for their efforts. This data alone doesn't provide all the answers to marketers questions, but if it can be paired with transactional and other relevant data like online behavior, marketers can get a clearer picture of what's working. 

Despite some privacy concerns associated with geolocation tools and the vast amount of information they gather — such as the American Civil Liberties Union of North California uncovering law enforcement's use of the tool to track activists and protesters — brands' interest in tapping into these tools has grown this year. This is a potential indicator that marketers are starting to derive meaningful insights from a real-time source of information that didn’t exist before the widespread adoption of mobile phones. Mobile platforms like InMarket, PlaceIQ, RetailMeNot and xAd are finding new ways to package location data to provide value for marketers.

The global market for location-based services is expected to grow by 40% each year between 2017 and 2021, according to London-based researcher Technavio. The firm said the growth will likely be driven by the surging number of mobile devices around the world, greater demand for navigation services and the rising integration of location-based search with social networks.