— Business Analytics

What the KPI Metrics that matter in restaurant marketing

There are certain business metrics that you can use to determine how well your marketing campaigns are working. These are called key performance indicators (KPI). They can be broken down into 3 main segments:

1. Building brand awareness for your restaurant – This is not a measure of customers or reservations, but rather, a measurement of how memorable your brand is to a potential customer. It can be measured by how often your brand is seen online through impressions. How high it is ranked when someone searches for your type of food, how much traffic your website and social media profiles receive in comparison to your competitors.

2. Measuring Engagement – How often customers engage with your restaurant online, or how often your customers discuss your brand with others in public forums. A few KPIs for this deal with how long someone visits your website, Facebook page or other social media profiles. How many pages on your site do they visit? This is a good indication that there is interest in what you have to say and conversely, what pages make them leave your site. This is called your bounce rate, and if people leave your site after only going to your landing page, it can negatively affect your ranking on Google.

3. Conversions on campaigns– Acquiring new and returning customers. The end goal of course is to get people in seats or ordering takeout, door dash, pickups etc. If you have an online ordering system than a conversion may be completing an order and paying. You may have an online reservation system, and a conversion might be people who make a reservation for a time to dine in your restaurant. There are also offline conversions, such as walk-ins due to someone finding your online. These are a bit more difficult to measure your ROI, as you need to ask how someone found you.