Why Restaurant Marketers Still Struggle with Data—and What to Do About It

Summary:

Most restaurant marketers are stuck using manual, time-consuming processes to manage fragmented data across POS, loyalty, and paid media systems. A new survey of 200+ restaurant professionals reveals the scope of this challenge and shows how tools like AdScience™ can centralize data, reduce reporting burdens, and improve decision-making.

Top Questions This Article Answers

1. Why is restaurant marketing data so difficult to unify?
2. How automated are reporting processes across the industry?
3. What are the biggest frustrations marketers face with reporting?
4. How can restaurant marketers improve ROI with better data integration?
5. What tools are best for connecting POS, loyalty, and media data?

The Restaurant Marketing Data Dilemma

Restaurant marketers are facing enormous pressure: prove ROI, drive local results, support national strategy, and deliver it all in real time. But the data needed to make those decisions is often scattered across systems that don’t communicate well, if at all.

To understand how marketers are coping with this challenge, Imaginuity surveyed over 200 professionals from across the restaurant industry, including QSR, fast casual, and multi-unit brands. The results confirmed what we hear from clients every day: despite growing digital maturity, data complexity remains one of the biggest barriers to smarter marketing.

What the Data Tells Us

The survey surfaced key insights about the current state of data integration in restaurant marketing:

• Only 20% say their reporting process is fully automated across systems like POS, loyalty, and paid media
• 31% cite the lack of a unified customer view as their biggest frustration
• 43% say measuring marketing ROI is still challenging
• 38% struggle with inconsistent metrics and definitions across departments
• 35% say the most valuable outcome of a new solution would be reducing manual hours spent compiling reports

“When your data doesn’t talk to each other, your team is flying blind,” said Matt Sommer, CTO at Imaginuity. “You can’t optimize what you can’t see—and that leads to missed opportunities, wasted spend, and inconsistent results.”

Why It’s Still So Hard

Even with modern tools, restaurant brands face entrenched challenges that prevent them from unlocking the full value of their data:

• Disconnected platforms: POS, loyalty, media platforms, and CRMs often operate in silos, making it difficult to tie customer actions to marketing touchpoints.
• Manual reporting: Many marketers are still exporting spreadsheets, stitching data together manually, and distributing custom reports across teams.
• Limited customization: Even when dashboards exist, they may not adapt easily to different user roles, leaving corporate teams with visibility, but locations and operators in the dark.

The Cost of Data Chaos

The business impact of disconnected data is significant. When marketers spend hours pulling reports instead of acting on insights, it slows down decisions and lowers campaign performance. Without a clear picture of how marketing affects customer behavior or sales outcomes, even the best campaigns can underdeliver.

Real-world consequences include:

• Inefficient ad spend due to lack of attribution
• Missed revenue from lapsed or underserved customer segments
• Inability to segment and personalize messaging by behavior or history
• Delayed reporting that reduces agility across campaigns and channels

What Marketers Actually Want

We asked respondents: What would make a marketing data integration tool a “no-brainer?”

Their top answers:

• 35%: A significant reduction in manual reporting time
• 21%: Demonstrable increases in sales attributable to marketing
• 18%: Measurable improvements in customer behavior metrics

In other words, they’re looking for time savings, transparency, and performance impact—not just another reporting tool.

How to Solve the Problem

Improving marketing performance starts with improving how data is managed, accessed, and acted on. Here are key recommendations based on the survey and our client work:

• Centralize data across systems: Connect POS, loyalty, campaign, and CRM data into a single environment
• Automate reporting: Eliminate manual pulls and spreadsheet stitching with automated dashboards
• Standardize metrics: Align definitions and KPIs across corporate and local marketing teams
• Customize for users: Build flexible views that surface relevant insights by role—corporate strategy, regional management, or local operators

The Role of AdScience™

Imaginuity’s proprietary platform, AdScience™, was built specifically to meet this challenge. Designed for multi-location brands, AdScience unifies operational and marketing data across your entire ecosystem. With AI-powered insights and customizable dashboards, it empowers marketing leaders to:

• See performance across all locations in real time
• Measure paid media ROI accurately
• Reduce time spent on manual report compilation
• Make faster, more confident decisions
• Attribute revenue to marketing efforts with greater precision

Whether you’re optimizing a national campaign or refining local offers, AdScience gives you the tools to act on data, not just collect it.

Conclusion

Restaurant marketers are operating in a high-stakes, data-rich environment. But without unified, actionable insights, that data becomes a liability instead of a strength. The good news? There’s a smarter way.

Download our full report to benchmark your own challenges and discover how your peers are approaching the same obstacles.