How to measure restaurant marketing results
Summary
Email open rates only tell part of the story. Three practical ways to measure what restaurant marketing actually returns: voucher codes, pixels and UTMs.
Three tools that tie your marketing to real covers and real revenue: voucher codes, website pixels and UTM tracking.
Email open rates only tell part of the story. What a restaurant actually needs from marketing measurement is the link between a campaign and a cover: did the email, ad or post turn into a booking, a visit and a closed cheque?
Three tools make that link visible, and none of them need a data team.
The attribution problem
The big attribution problem in hospitality is tying online marketing to in-venue conversions. Here are three ways to close the gap and understand customer behaviour properly.
1. Unique voucher codes
Unique voucher codes link your offers to the emails that sent them. Each campaign gets its own code, so when a guest comes in to redeem one, that conversion traces back to the specific campaign.
That gives you granular campaign reporting: exactly how many repeat visits and how much revenue came off the back of each voucher campaign.
2. Website pixel
To know whether your website is converting new customers into bookings, install a website pixel: a simple line of tracking code on a webpage. You may have done something similar with Google or Facebook.
The pixel shows how customers interact with your website, page by page. That tells you how many bookings come via the site and where those visitors came from, for example email, advertising or social. It also highlights your best-performing landing pages and where the site needs work, like another 'book now' button above the fold.
Stampede reporting closes the loop from there: a click on your campaign, followed all the way through to a closed cheque at your restaurant.
3. UTM tracking
UTMs show what people do after they read your email: which links they click and where they go next. A UTM is a short piece of text added to the end of a URL, and Google Analytics uses it to tell one traffic source from another.
UTMs let you trace customer activity from landing to action, like booking a table, back to one source, for example the button in your email.
How to build a UTM:
Campaign source: the referrer, for example newsletter
Campaign medium: the channel, for example email
Campaign name: the campaign, for example summer_offer
Campaign content: extra detail, for example booking_button
Want to measure more of your marketing results and conversions in one place? Book a demo and we will show you how.
See it running on your venues
One unified guest record across Wi-Fi, bookings, reviews and loyalty, and the marketing that acts on it.