What Metrics Should You Track on a Restaurant Website?

The acid test of any restaurant website is whether or not you can clearly see it’s driving more customers through your doors. This can be pretty easy to track, you put something on the website about a steak night and people turn up – it clearly works. But what if you want to dig a little deeper and find out more specific metrics to get a better insight; which social media platforms result in bookings, where are vistitors coming from, which of the restaurant directories you’ve paid to be in send you the most traffic? (if any at all!), which menu are people looking at the most are just some of the things you might want to find out.

All that might sound complex but all you need to start finding out how your website is performing is to ensure you have Google Analytics correctly configured on your website. Once that’s set up and tracking correctly you’re good to go.

Always focus on the real money metrics first and foremost

Because analytics reports so much it can be tempting to dive right in and pull out the most obscure data yet believe it’s hugely important. Sure the fact people in Leeds view 10 more pages on average than people in Bradford might be useful at some stage, but it’s not the first thing you should look at. As a restaurant owner it’s essential you closely monitor the return on investment your website brings. So how do you do that?

Setup Conversion and Goal Tracking

If you don’t have goals setup then your website has no outcomes for you to measure which is commonly referred to as online suicide. The goals for a restaurant website can varly greatly but in general it’s likely that the goal is for a visitor to hit submit on your online table booking form. The beauty of goals is that you can add a monetary conversion to each conversion, so for example let’s say the average spend per head at your restaurant at £30 and the average table size is 3. That means on average, for every booking your website brings you’ll generate £90 in revenue. To setup goals follow this tutorial.

Goals create actionable data which in turn creates decision making, with goals you can now easily work out;

• Return on Investment
• Cost Per Acquistion
• Which mediums work best for your restaurant
• Where to focuse more of your marketing efforts
• Which areas you should ditch completely

Top tip – even though your website isn’t an ecommerce site per se, you can still configure ecommerce tracking to pull in even more information for more accurate return on investment data.

An example…

If you’re actively marketing your restaurant and paying a company to do it, then clearly there’s a cost involved. Let’s say you’re paying an SEO company to bring targeted traffic to your website and you’re also paying for listings in various local directories and food guides, because you have goals setup you can easily see the return they bring. Based on the average customer spend at £90 let’s take a look at the example below:

Kill things that don’t bring you a return. Invest more in ones that do. Simple, right?

Key Point: The above chart only assumes customers visit once and doesn’t take into account the lifetime value of a customer!

Ok bottom line first but what other metrics should I look at?

Once you’ve setup goals and focused on outcomes, you can start digging a little deeper to try and give those outcomes a boost. The beauty of Google analytics is that it tracks such a wide range of things allowing you to extract as much, or as little data as you’d like. So let’s take a look at what you might want to consider monitoring:

Bounce Rate

What does it mean?
Bounce rate essentially means a visitor that landed on your site and left immediately without viewing any other pages.

Why is it useful?
Bounce rate is a great metric for assessing whether you’re website is relevant to the people that are landing on it or whether you’re sending relevant traffic to irrelevant/hideous landing pages. For example – if you’re photography is horrendous, it’s likely users will bounce off without giving you a second chance. First impressions count for a restaurant and you have to do your level best to make sure that your website creates love at first sight!

Where can I find it?
It is used across all analytics reports but check this report first: Content > Site Content > Landing Pages

Visitor Loyalty and Visitor Recency

Whats the sign of a successful restaurant? When customers keep coming back time and time again? Right on! The same principle applies to a restaurants website – just like you want people to visit your restaurant all the time, you also want them to keep coming back to your website too.

What does it show?
These two metrics show if people visit your site repeatedly and if they do it more frequently.

Why is it useful?
Loyalty is a great way to understand the strength of your brand, if your website isn’t getting customers to visit again and again then chances are it’s not created an engaging experience

Loyalty is also useful for understanding effectiveness of your marketing campaigns because it allows you to work out if you are driving behavior beyond the sign up. For example, you might generate a ton of traffic through twitter – but are these users coming back?

Where can I find it?

Audience Report > Behaviour > Frequency & Recency.

Top Referring Sites

What does it show?

This reporting section shows all the other various websites that have sent traffic to your own website – if you’re a restaurant expect to see sites like Trip Advisor on there.

Why is it useful?

As a restaurant owner you no doubt get approached all the time by websites claiming to be “the best restaurant directory around” sign up to our Gold package for just £XX per year. In fact you’ve probably signed up to some of these sites, so the referring sites report is ideal to check on whether these sites are worth the money.

It’s also great to check on untapped potential, perhaps you’re the 7th best restaurant in your area on Trip Advisor but you’re still getting traffic from it, it’d be a great move to ask some customers to leave a review of their experience so hopefully you move up the leaderboard.

You can also use this to monitor how many visits social media sites like Twitter and Facebook send you and if you’ve got goal tracking setup you can even find out if direct bookings come through those sites.

Where can I find it?

Traffic sources > Sources > Referrals

Top Content

What does it show?

The top content report, as the name suggests, shows you the most popular content on your website in terms of the number of times it was viewed.

Why is it useful?

As a restaurant we’d expect your contact page to be the most viewed page after your homepage (which will always be top dog for obvious reasons) but top content is very useful for looking at which news items proved popular or caught peoples attention. It’s also great for assessing which menus are the most popular, some restaurant websites even have individual pages for certain dishes, by assessing the popularity of those you can promote them to the homepage, base an offer around them or even put the price up

Where can I find it?

Content > Site Content > Pages

Non Branded Search Traffic

What does it show?
All the traffic that landed on your site through search engines that didn’t include your brand name in the search term.

Why is it useful?

If you’re actively promoting your website in the search engines then this is a great metric to keep track of, you’ll find a great deal of keyword data that searchers are using to find you allowing to find profitable keywords, spot opportunities that your competitors aren’t ranking for and to measure the success of an SEO campaign.

Where can I find it?

Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic (Then click advanced and exclude keywords containing your brand name)

Stay tuned for part 2 on tracking micro + macro conversions and using Google analytics to create even more actionable data.