Smart restaurants don’t focus only on generating traffic and sales, they also focus on generating leads.
They know that generating leads can give them the recurring traffic and sales that they need to flourish as a business.
This is something that very successful restaurants know versus other not so successful restaurants.
In order to manage these leads correctly, you have know where each lead comes from and what each person, who is a lead, is looking for from your business.
In this post, I’m going to outline how we can track where leads come from so you can better serve your leads and get them to become customers of your restaurant.
What is a restaurant lead?
Lead generation isn’t a common term in the restaurant industry. Restaurants Are perceived as business to consumer businesses while leads are more widely used in business to business settings.
However, restaurants actually do have huge potential to sell to other businesses. Many restaurants who have been successful with selling to other businesses have used lead generation strategies in their business to business efforts. After learning how successful restaurant lead generation can be, they started applying it for all customer generating efforts.
A lead for your business is someone that is interested in taking the next step towards a specific transaction with your business.
The reason they haven’t been able to purchase could be one of many. For example, the lead could just want to talk to a human before deciding. They could have additional questions not already answered online. They could also be ready to transact but you don’t have an online payment system available.
So, instead of purchasing from you, they input their information on any of your properties basically “leaving a message” for you so you can contact them back.
What do you do with restaurant leads?
Before contacting a lead, you want to know as much information about the lead so you can serve them to the best of your knowledge and ability.
For example, if they lead was interested in a specific coupon and wanted to know more about the coupon such as expiration date, rules, and restrictions, you would want to know how they found you, how they found the coupon and which coupon they are interested in before you reply to them.
If you want to know how to get leads for your restaurant, read my other post about how i generated 1000 leads for a teppanyaki restaurant in 3 months, helping them get $10,575.50 in additional sales.
Read on if you’d like to know how I tracked each of the leads and used the tracking data to best serve each customer as well as automate our responses.
Most lead generation happens on a website. Websites can connect with website tracking services such as Google Analytics and Facebook Pixel. Many websites also have their own reporting.
Generally, the best lead generation tracking service that is free and works with most softwares is Google Analytics.
In this post, I’ll teach you how to track your leads from customer discovery to customer lead.
These are the details you will need:
- URL of lead generation page
- URL of lead generation confirmation page
- UTM params of lead source
If you haven’t installed a Google Analytics tracking tag on your restaurant website yet, you can follow the instructions here to do so.
After you have installed the Google Analytics tracking tag for your restaurant website, you can now create a Goal within Google Analytics. The Goal function in Google Analytics lets you know who reaches a certain point within your website. In this case, we want to set up a Goal that tells us who input their information as a lead and then went to the thank you page or confirmation page after giving their information.
In Google Analytics, go to Admin on the bottom left of the screen:
Next, click on Goals:
And now you will be on the Goals settings:
Click on New Goal:
Select custom and press continue:
Name your goal and click on Destination, then continue:
Here, you will put the confirmation or thank you page URL. You don’t have to assign a value or specify a funnel. You can click on verify this goal if you want to see what Google Analytics has tracked for this page so far.
Either way, you can save the goal.
Now, we want to see this goal in our reporting and we also want to see where people came from to get to this goal.
From here, click on Acquistion > All Traffic > Source/Medium.
Then, change the right side of the conversions drop down to “All Goals.” Now, you should be able to see all people who hit the goal you just set. In my case, I got 1 lead from a Facebook ad and the other lead was from Thrivethemes.com (I actually had them test for me).
Now you should be able to track exactly where your leads came from
You must be wondering from here… how do I know which of these leads actually became a customer inside the restaurant?
Well, if you had the right tools, you can track the way customers use your offer or coupon.
I put together a guide for how to track customer coupon usage and attribute it to your leads.
What offer will you use this tracking method for?