Most restaurants set the phone number as their contact method, which poses some obstacles in terms of the number of simultaneous reservations and availability to take calls, among others, which is not very productive. The same occurs with other methods such as WhatsApp or contact forms.
Fortunately, more and more restaurants are investing in automating these processes by adding reservation engines to their website, allowing multiple users to twitter database simultaneously check restaurant availability, choose a time that suits them, and free up the staff for other tasks. This allows restaurant productivity to be measured, and by being able to measure it, it can be improved.
Setting up Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager to measure bookings
Restaurants go one step further by measuring their website traffic with Google Analytics (UA/GA4) in addition to using these booking engines. They also want to know where their bookings are coming from, especially if they invest in advertising campaigns. Unfortunately, this is not as simple as adding a pixel to the website, as is the case with Google Analytics or Meta.
In order to properly measure restaurant reservations in Google Analytics (or any other web analytics tool), we will need to set up a cross-domain configuration so that the cookies containing the user information (source, medium, campaign, etc.) are transferred from domain 1 (the restaurant) to domain 2 (the booking engine) and back. This configuration has become more complex in recent years with the cookie restrictions imposed by the EU.
In order to do this, you will need a Google Tag Manager (GTM) account, a Google Analytics account, and a booking engine installed, such as CoverManager, The Fork, or TripAdvisor. You will then need to establish a link between domains 1 and 2 in both GTM and UA/GA4 so that Google understands that the transfer of information between both domains is authorized, since, by rule, this transfer is blocked. To do this, we will need to adjust fields in our GTM tag such as “allowLinker”, “storage” and “hitCallback”. Once we know this, we must test in each case which configuration works for each restaurant, since there will be changes depending on the CMS used and the general situation of the website.
