Ottawa SEO Consultant

Google Analytics

Tracking Restaurant Orders in Google Analytics

January 30, 2013 – 3:03 pm

Being able to see your basic website usage stats like visits and page views is good, but being able to understand what channels drove more revenue and transactions is even better. A vast number of web analytics software provide the flexibility to do this type of custom tracking, but little do we know the advantages it can bring.

I recently began testing a more unique usage of Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics for restaurant websites. And so far, it’s been a fairly smooth sail. If you’re just starting with Ecommerce Tracking in Google Analytics, I recommend reading Justin’s 4 part series on this subject on his blog.

One might think that Ecommerce tracking is only for online stores. And yes, it’s been built right from the start to serve online retail websites that have a checkout engine. But, any website can have its own funnel and way to convert visitors into monetary gains. My approach from the very start was; “how can I fill as many of the fields with the relevant data points on a food order as possible?”

The Restaurant Scenario

Local restaurants struggle to keep up with all the activities that are happening online. They:

Don’t have the bandwidth to manage their online presence;
Lack the knowledge to do things right that will drive results; and,
Shouldn’t have to because they should focus on what they do best; Cook!

Some of you may dined at a Cathay Restaurant in Ottawa at some point (if you’ve ever visited the city). My family used to own that. About 2 years ago, we sold it as the partners, including my dad, were ready to retire. The restaurant business was also becoming more fierce as more variety started to hit the city. One of the struggles was online. We didn’t have an online ordering system. As a result, there were customers that we lost because we didn’t have an online menu for them to place an order without needing to pick up the phone and calling. I see two benefits with online food ordering systems today:

It gives local restaurants another acquisition medium to gain more customers;
Reduce mistakes on delivery addresses and orders; and,
It relieves the stress and reduces the amount of work for employees who answer phone calls to take orders.

Almost every restaurant will offer delivery and takeout services. This is essentially what we want to track in our analytics backend. So yes – this requires communication between two systems; your database for where orders are stored and Google Analytics. By creating a communication channel between these two systems, we can start to answer the following:

How many delivery / takeout orders were places over a time period in relation to our website traffic
Which day(s) do people visit the website more, and does that correlate with online orders
What combinations of food orders are most popular for online orders
What is the most popular dish for online orders
From what sources / mediums were most orders driven from
What sources / mediums assisted in the converting of a customer
# people who viewed our menu and left
# people who viewed our menu, proceeded to checkout and left (unsuccessful conversion)
and probably more…

Being able to look this data and determine what sources drove more online orders is, to a business owner, golden! As an analyst, I would then be able to go back to my client and tell them where they need to invest more money in order to drive more qualified traffic and conversions.

I’ve been in luck to work with Menu.ca’s online ordering system, injecting their’s systems data (transactionID, items, etc.) inside Google Analytics. Their system is robust, clean and serves local restaurants owners well. They are also a cost-effective solution for any business what requires a custom website and an online ordering system.

Getting this into Google Analytics

For e-commerce tracking to work in Google Analytics, we will need to turn the Google Analytics e-commerce tracking option ON in your profile settings, and then add a few lines of code to our receipt page.

Step 1: turn on e-commerce tracking in admin > profile > profile settings

Step 2: write the code and upload it to the receipt page

There are three methods we need to call: _addItem(), _addTrans() and _trackTrans(). I’m not going to go through the nitty gritty so you’ll have to either follow the detailed documentation or check out the 4 part series I mentioned earlier (it’s awesome again). But let’s walk through how we define our methods / variables.

The _addItem() method is where we add each individual dish from our menu. For instance, we may have the following:

_addItem(transactionId, sku, name, category, price, quantity)

transactionId = orderID
sku = dishID
category = delivery/takeout
price = price of the dish
quantity = number of orders per dish

For the addItem(), you may even add a Delivery Fee to your order list if delivery was selected. When takeout is selected, you will need to disregard the delivery charge.

_addTrans(transactionId, affiliation, total, tax, shipping, city, state, country)

transactionID = orderID
affiliation = restaurant name
total = total after taxes and other charges
shipping = tip amount
city, state, country = disregarded, I didn’t use these fields

Finally, in order to push this information into Google Analytics, we need to execute the _trackTrans() method. Once that happens, you should start to see this data populate in your Ecommerce Reports.

How does the data look inside Google Analytics?

You’re probably wondering how this data populates into the Google Analytics reports… here are a few screenshots of the data I’ve got right now:

The E-commerce Overview report will give you high level performance metrics for a given timeframe. It will how you the how well your site converted your visitors, how much money you made, how many orders were placed and the average value of each order.

The e-commerce Transactions report will break down each order transaction, detailing the revenue, tax, delivery tips (if delivery was selected and the customer confirms a % tip on the site prior to checkout) and the amount of dishes per order.

This is cool – for the first time, restaurant owners can see where most of their “qualified traffic” is coming from. This All Traffic (under Traffic Sources) report breaks down by source / medium where most visitors came from, and from where they converted. *Valuing a source requires us taking a look at the amount of traffic and transactions that took place. So while Bing has a high per visit value, it didn’t drive nearly enough traffic and sales as Google organic. It’s interesting to see other mediums like Facebook, Urbanspoon, TripAdvisor and Yelp driving sales too.

How many orders came from mobile device compared to desktop?

Closing Thoughts

The steps to implement this properly to bring accurate / real-time data into Google Analytics was definitely a walk in the park. It required some creativity, careful planning and some technical skills to get custom code up and running. Google Analytics offers a good solution for tracking restaurant orders, but it could be better.

Because the commerce tracking fields are limited to the variables outlined above, there are a few things that I was hoping to include but couldn’t:

Upsell items (i.e. pizza toppings often come at an additional cost. If toppings could be grouped within an item, that would be cool!)
Categories for transactions (currently we are only able to categorize items, which makes sense from an ecommerce standpoint. Categories for transactions would allow us to categorize delivery and takeouts).
Payment methods – cash on delivery, credit card or debit are often the sorts of options that delivery services offer these days.

I would be happy to hear if anyone’s gone through this exercise before and if they saw benefits of this feature for restaurant websites. If you have any other ideas for me to try out, please let me know below!

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5 Tips for Giving a Kickass Presentation

October 9, 2012 – 9:00 am

One of my greatest fears since childhood is standing up in front of an audience and talking. Born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, my English is sound, I’ve risen my hands countless times in class, but I still have (had) this fear of speaking to a large crowd on my own. Over past 5 years, I’ve met and listened to countless entrepreneurs, some of whom are today my mentors. Having met and engaged with them have changed the way I approach public speaking.

A few months back, I was invited to speak at the Google Analytics User’s Great Event (GAUGE) in Boston. This became my very first major speaking gig. Leading up to this point, I’ve learned a lot from that peers I have around me. Preparing for this conference was absolutely an enjoyable one. From crafting the presentation slides to getting up on stage – it feels rewarding to have the opportunity to share your knowledge and experience with others.

As some of you know, I’ve spoken at local meetups around the Ottawa area, including the Ottawa WordPress Meetup, Ottawa Web Design/UX/Development Meetup, and the Ottawa Web Marketing Group. I still feel internal presentations like Lunch n Learns are huge accomplishments and great for practice if you’re just starting your speaking journey. But I’ll just say one thing; getting up on a biggest stage didn’t change how I would present / my presentation style. But, it did make me work harder to pull something together that is more awesome than I’ve ever done before.

Whether you are an avid presenter or one starting out, I thought I’d share 5 tips that I think, will make your presentation just that more “kickass”… here we go:

1- Your comfort and readiness is more important than your slides

We all know how fun it is to pick and choose PowerPoint templates, or to look for the best images to go with your slides. Graphs are also troublesome. If you’ve built slide with graphs before, you know what I mean The key to a great presentation is not having perfect slides, but whether You are comfortable with your own material.

Looking back, I remember my coach always telling me “practice makes perfect”. Whether you are on a volleyball court or on a stage in front of 500 people, this principle still applies. So, you better know your game or you’ll get crushed!

Back to the slides… I hear time and time again; if you can present something without any slides, you’re a star! The worst thing that could happen in a presentation, is if someone turns their head to the slides and begins reaching each line and point on that slide! I’ve done that before, and for a long time too. But as I worked on my slides over time, I began to include less text and more visuals. A good exercise would be to go back to your slides, run through them, and for every slide that you have more than 1 sentence and 10 words, redo them. Look at those slides now, and try to speak to your point. There’s less to read now, so I hope you’ve come up with more to talk about without looking at your slides.

This is a great presentation by Jesse Desjardins on You Suck at PowerPoint. Learned a lot here, check it out! (http://www.slideshare.net/jessedee/you-suck-at-powerpoint-2)

2- The first 2 minutes are crucial for you to make a good impression

This one I would tip that my mentor, Alex Langshur, who provided some feedback while I was prepping to go on stage.

Why is the first 2 minutes crucial? It may be the first time that the people in the audience will have listened to you speak. Starting off strong, simply by making a positive impression of yourself, can dictate how well your 45 minute spotlight will go.

I typically will do the following:

Introduce who I am; name, title, the company that I work for and something (1 item) personal about myself
Ask a question to the audience along the lines of “so, how many SEOs do we have in the room today?” or “how many of you are experience ninja’s at link building?” just to get a feel of who might be in the room if you are walking in blind. A question is a great kicker to ask because it gets people involved right from the get-go.
Depending on your time limit and the format, I typically enjoy taking questions along the way. Opening the dialog up allows a 2 way discussion, rather than me puking information with no understanding on whether you’ve consumed it as knowledge. If you’re in the room of 50+ or more, this is hard to do, so I would refrain from doing it and saving the questions to the end.

3 – End your presentation strong

While you always want to the beginning to be memorable, the ending is just as important. When I get to my Q&A slide, and nobody has any questions, I typically will ask a generic question to get people raising their hands or nodding. When you do that, people tend to react.

There’s a fascinating study about “the first follower“. It wasn’t until after my presentation that I heard about it. Derek Sivers on Ted.com talks about “How to start a movement” and he quickly showed in a 2 minute clip how one individual attracted and nurtured one follower, which eventually grow into a tribe. Check out the video if you have 3 minutes, it’s worth it. The concept applies here because you may notice that during your Q&A session, the person to ask a question will tend to break the ice for others, and others people start to put their hands up. Sometimes, you just need a little nudge to get them going. Humans are curious creatures.

4 – Accept feedback from your attendees (positive or constructive)

I haven’t received any negative feedback from the audience where I’ve presented at. High fives and “great job on that presentation, I learned a lot” are great to hear, but even better are those who approach you with additional questions or say something constructive that I would be able to take and massage my presentation abilities later on. Additional questions are worth paying attention to because I’ve had a few people point out things that I may not have included in my slides, and I later think, “AH! Forgot to put it in, will do that next time!”. But, don’t try to cram everything in your slides. Learn to weed out the items that are less important, and add in those that are highly voted on or as you perceive popular and valuable.

5 – Be yourself and have fun

Nobody likes to be lectured. Nobody likes to listen to somebody who is stuck up or cocky because they say they know everything. Even experts, especially in the field of Internet Marketing, will admit that they don’t know everything. But, as consultants, we need to keep our composure and react to those scenarios.

I do believe though, that people are always looking to be entertained. Whether it be a few giggles here and there, or something new that lights up the bulb above their head, do your best to make it fun and engaging. I especially enjoy watching Wil Reynold of SEER Interactive speak (get his full talk from Mozcon). I wish I could have attended his session in person, but hopefully next year I can make it out!

Personal branding has everything to do with being yourself. What are one or two attributes that you want to leave your mark with? For me – it’s young and energetic!

Do you have any personal presentation skills worth mentioning? I would love to hear from you in the comments below! Thanks for stopping by and reading.

Bonus tip – never say “you know” in your presentation!

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Keyword Research News SEO

My Blog Post Made it into a Digital Magazine!

September 7, 2012 – 2:53 am

A month ago, our marketing manager at Cardinal Path approached me with a proposition; whether I wanted my blog post to be featured in a digital magazine. I said, "Heck yaaa!"

Purple Internet Marketing assembled together 8 articles on keyword research, all of which hit on a different aspects of this important task. Undoubtly, keyword research, or research in general, is the more critical part of any marketing campaign. If you're a business investing in paid search or organic search, you better be spending a lot of time researching keywords and understanding the principles of this practice. Want to learn more? Check out my blog post: Steps to an Effective Keyword Research Process (ah, you get it for free! But not the rest ).