Improve your website’s success

It’s common to think that once your website has gone live you can sit back and wait for the sales to roll in. But website design is an ongoing process. There’s no end of small changes you can make to improve a visitor’s experience and increase the numbers booking a table.

But before you can start improving your website, you need to know what your visitors are doing. This is why analytics is a key part of your restaurant online marketing strategy.

Google Analytics

Analytic software enables you to record every mouse click and page view. You can see which pages are the most popular and which send your visitors heading for the exit.

The most popular stats package around is Google Analytics for a number of very good reasons (one of which is that it’s free!). You can start using Google analytics to track what visitors to your website are doing simply by inserting some code, which it provides you with, into the footer section of your website’s code.

Once it’s up and running you can unearth a wealth of valuable information from your Google Analytics dashboard about your restaurant marketing online strategy. This includes:

The number of website visits
The number of pages visitors look at
The average number of pages per visit
The average amount of time people spend on your website
The bounce rate (how many people leave straight away)

Google Analytics will also tell you how many people are finding you through the search engines, so you can gauge the success of your search engine optimisation (SEO) campaign.

By tracking what people are doing you can see which website pages are sending business to your restaurant and which need more work. For example, if people are leaving your website after viewing your photos page it might be time to ditch your camera phone and pay for a professional photographer.

Useful links:

http://www.google.com/analytics/
http://www.statcounter.com/

By Louise Routledge in Blog