Google Analytics is a wonderful (and free!) digital marketing tool that gives you deep insight into how your customers discover you. Using Google Analytics data captured from your website allows you to understand what channels are working, and where to focus your digital marketing efforts. If used correctly, Google Analytics data can be a powerful tool to add to your belt, and can help support an effective digital marketing strategy for your restaurant.
What is Google Analytics?
Simply put, your website, when paired with Google Analytics, can capture search engine and web traffic. Ultimately giving you a detailed picture of the direct and measured results of your digital marketing efforts.
Some of the data points that Google Analytics can tell you:
- How people are finding your site (i.e., organic searches, paid traffic, other websites)
- How long they stay on your page
- Where users are located
- What time of day they visit your site
There is a lot more that Google Analytics can track, but these are a few of the important metrics we advise to look into when analyzing your restaurant’s digital marketing initiatives. Once you feel comfortable tracking these figures, you can delve further into other metrics provided by Google Analytics and what search terms or keywords customers are using to discover you to drive both paid and organic search traffic to your website.
So how do you even get started with using Google Analytics for your restaurant?
How to install Google Analytics onto your restaurant’s website
Installing analytics, if it hasn’t been done already, is pretty easy! You can go to Google Analytics, and sign up with your Google username and password (or create a new account if you don’t have one already).
It’ll ask you for some basic information about your business. Once you fill that out, you’ll follow these steps:
- Create Property.
- Give your property a name. The name of your restaurant or business is sufficient.
- Click “Show Advanced Options” and toggle “Create a Universe Analytics Property”
- Enter in your website URL
- Check, “Create a Universal Analytics property only”
You’ll add this UA Website Tracking Code provided by Google into the footer of your site, and that’s pretty much it.
You’re all set to start tracking!
What metrics should I track?
Your initial analytics strategy should be used to understand your audience in more detail and how they have discovered you.
This will give you the building blocks for your customer acquisition strategy, and you can continue to refine and build from there. Here are some of the best analytics to track for your restaurant marketing strategy:
- Where is your audience coming from? This will help you understand which channels are working well for your marketing and doubling down on those efforts:
- Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels
- Is your audience coming from a specific source? Is there an article about your business that’s bringing more traffic in, or a particular webpage? This can help with future marketing efforts.
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- Acquisition > All Traffic > Referrals
- When are people visiting your site? Do you see more traffic during lunch hour or prime dinner hours? Using this data, you can create targeted social media and email campaigns when traffic is the highest to capture attention.
- Where are users located? If there is more traffic outside your city, are you able to expand services to reach them?
- Audience > Geo > Location
It is essential to remember when looking at analytics that it’s important to look at each data point as a part of the whole story. These numbers can be influenced by a variety of factors, and looking into how your strategy feeds into the data will be important to understand what different campaigns are working.
You can also use this data to inform future marketing efforts. For example, you can use peak times when users are on your site and the cities they’re visiting from to launch paid or email campaigns accordingly.
There are many different ways to play around and gain granular data about your customers. But the best way to utilize this information and to ensure your strategy is successful is by using this data to help define clear objectives and KPI’s.
If you aren’t sure how to use Google analytics for your restaurant marketing, or what objectives you should be focusing on when initially looking at analytics, get in touch! We can help you craft expert digital marketing strategies using your analytics for results-driven restaurant marketing.
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