The Challenge

Since the introduction of digital marketing, we have held ad dollars to a higher standard than traditional media and advertising relating to conversion tracking. We want to know EXACTLY where leads came from. In the case of our client, a 7 location restaurant group, the challenge came from not having a clear direction on what channels were impacting their bottom dollar per channel per location – more specifically their online orders.

This is called a challenge section for a reason, especially when you add in the dynamics of third-party systems such the Grubhubs and Seamless of the worlds. We know that ordering food online isn’t a simple process from a user perspective. Sure, someone could land a website but it would not be just one click of a button — there is an involved sequence of steps that a user has to take, from browsing the menu to adding to the cart, to account creation, special requests (hold the cheese, please)and approvals (“need plasticware?”) before eventually confirming their order. Sounds exhausting, but that pad thai at home is TOTALLY worth it, or so we think.

Our client could see conversions but was unsure where to begin to break down the data points. Insert Liftly. Liftly partnered with this restaurant group to create and illustrate how users are interacting with the online ordering feature. We also were able to help identify variances in traffic quality coming to online order. Not all orders are created equal – looking at you, gluten-free peeps.

The Solve

Though the complexities of tracking are plentiful, this approach, in understanding user behavior and attaching triggers to it on the site, provided our client and Liftly insights into user milestones.

We wanted this to integrate with Google Analytics, which is where they track their website analytics. Our client calls GA via Google Tag Manager across all pages on their domain, including the online ordering feature, which is a third-party React app built by GoParrot.

Our aim was to create milestones in GA to follow the online ordering process: viewed menu, viewed cart, logged in, approved special requests, confirmed order. There are a few different ways you can do this, and given how GoParrot’s online delivery feature is built, we felt the most reliable would be to create GTM triggers when certain elements important to the order flow are visible in the user’s screen.

For example, when the “enter credit card number” field is visible, we know the user has reached the “enter payment” step.

These triggers then fire non-interaction events in GA, which we can easily aggregate for high-level analytics on the checkout process and assign back to users and sessions in deeper analysis.

The Resolution

Complexity solved. Well, for now. Gaining this insight has been invaluable for all restaurants in understanding traffic sources and the channels that are driving completed orders. This has allowed the restaurant group to allocate more ad dollars to channels that are more likely to complete an order. No More Wasted Clicks.

So how does our client manage this on a day-to-day basis – an excel nightmare… Kidding. Liftly opted to build a clean and user-friendly dashboard for the client in Google Data Studio, pulling data into cleanly designed visualizations for data points most important to the client. Now they can quickly log in, scan, and find the data that they need. Best part: this is already included in their agency fees. You read that right, no upcharges here.

As you can see, Liftly solves problems. What can we help you solve?