If your restaurant has a website or a website with online orders, you must have Google Analytics on your website.
Google Analytics is a free web analytics tracking tool that provides highly useful out-of-the-box reports for restaurant owners. They can help you understand:
- The profile of the person who is placing the order on your website
- From which device are you ordering
- The time that he does it
- The area where you order
Read on for tips on how to set up and optimize this important restaurant tool.
Google Analytics account settings
If you already have Google Analytics installed, you can skip this point.
Just go to the main Google Analytics page, and log in with your Google or Gmail account. If you don’t have it, you will have to create one. Then click on “Register” to start using Google Analytics.
It will then ask you for basic information about your website: account name, website name, website url, sector category and reporting time zone. When finished, it will give you a code, which you must insert in your web page.
You may need your programmer for this, but it won’t take more than literally a minute.
Clever! In 24 hours you will be able to return and see the information generated.
5 Google Analytics tips for restaurateurs
1. Discover the device with which they visit you
Knowing from which device you receive visits is very important to make important decisions on your website: if you receive a high percentage of traffic from a Tablet or mobile, you should analyze if your page looks good and loads fast on those devices, even if It is convenient to offer an App, and if more people come from Android than from Apple, or vice versa.
To find out, go to “Audience> Mobile devices> Overview”. You will see a table that will show you the visits from mobile, tablet and desktop computer, with the visits and bounce of each one.
If you want to know the exact brand of the device, under the overview, click on “Devices”. You will see the exact device.
2. Analyze traffic by city
Unless you own a chain present in several cities such as McDonald’s or Starbucks, you are not interested more than the people who visit you in the city where you have your restaurant. It is very easy to know.
On the left side of Google Analytics, click Audience> Geographic information> Locationn. You will see a world map that shows you the traffic obtained by each country. But this does not work for you, you do not have a chain worldwide.
Go to the bottom and you will see the list of the countries with the most visits, just search for yours, click there, and you will now see a map of your country and the list of cities at the bottom. Click on your city.
Browse the nearby cities and where you have the business and compare the traffic with the total that you receive to your page.
This information will help you answer these questions:
- The traffic that comes to the website of my business, is it from customers close to my restaurant or not?
- Is traffic in neighboring cities important enough to offer online orders?
- Do few or many people come from my city, or on the contrary, does the traffic come from places that you cannot attend?
3. Find out the time they visit your website
You will not see this report in the default Google Analytics report. It is very useful information and can be obtained in a simple way to know the times of the day when the traffic to your website is highest or lowest.
On the left side of the screen, click Personalization> Custom reports> + New custom report.
The screen you will see is the following:
Title the report however you like, for example “Hourly report”. In the metrics section, add “Sessions” (blue) and in dimension, “hour” (Green). Here’s how it should look: Click save, and you’ll see the report, which should look like this:
What do you want this report for? I give you some ideas
- Depending on the time most visited, you will know if they are looking for you for breakfast, lunch or dinner
- You can set schedules based on the most searched schedule on your website
- You will be able to create promotions according to schedules, as some do with their “happy hour”.
4. Compare your website with that of other restaurants
A huge advantage that Google Analytics offers for business is comparing your results with that of the industry. When you created your account, Google asked you the category of your business, and that question is for something.
You can quickly and easily compare the behavior and growth of your restaurant’s website with that of the industry or category you chose.
Just go to “Audience> Comparisons”, there you will see that you can compare by: channels, location, devices, etc.
Analyze each one, and see if your restaurant grows or declines relative to the industry. For example, your mobile traffic may decrease while that of the rest grows, or your traffic from Madrid to your website grows while that of the industry decreases.
It is key to making decisions such as: creating an App, offering promotions according to the area that grows or decreases, etc.
5. Monitor the speed of your website
How to know that your website is the fastest or slowest in the neighborhood? Google Analytics offers a much more useful performance graph than other services that offer metrics based on load time from distant servers.
Just go to “Behavior> Site Speed”. There you will see the overview, by pages (broken down), and even suggestions.
Remember that speed is key, especially on mobile devices, where Google recommends taking no more than five seconds to load the page.
Ready to get information? Start using Google Analytics now.