Most restaurant owners can't tell you which websites, search terms, or social posts are actually bringing in reservations. With 88 Restaurants you can now see exactly where every booking comes from and how much it was worth.

Google Analytics is a free tool from Google that sits on your website and records how each visitor found you: a search on Google, a tap from your Instagram bio, a click off your Yelp page, a link in an email you sent. It's the same tracking the big reservation platforms and chains have leaned on for years to decide where their marketing actually goes. 

On its own, though, it has a blind spot. Google Analytics is good at counting visits. It's not good at telling you what those visits were worth. It can show that 500 people landed on your site from Instagram last week, but it can't tell you that only three of them booked a table, or that those three tables added up to $400 in covers. Traffic that never turns into a reservation isn't marketing that's working. It just looks busy. 

That gap between "people showed up" and "people booked a table" is the part we closed.

Before, when a customer hit "reserve," they'd get bounced over to 88restaurants.com to finish — which meant Google Analytics lost track of where that customer came from right at the finish line.

Now the whole booking happens on your own domain. This means we are able to track users through each step of the reservation process.

This is where it gets useful. You set an average cover amount — say $50 per person — and every reservation gets tagged with its revenue amount based on party size. A table for two is worth $100. A party of six is $300. That number follows the reservation back to wherever it came from.

So instead of "I think Instagram is working," you can pull up a dashboard and see: "Google brought us $8,400 in reservations last month. Instagram brought us $1,200. Yelp brought us $400."

Now the decisions get obvious. You know which sources deserve more of your time, which ones aren't pulling their weight, and which ones you should probably stop worrying about.

For every reservation through your site, you can see:

You might find Instagram is great for Friday and Saturday night bookings but does nothing for weekday lunch. Or that a local event blog is responsible for half your Sunday brunch covers. Once you can see which channels have the highest ROI, you stop marketing on instinct.

You don't need to be running ads to get value from this. Your reservations are already coming from somewhere — Google searches, your website, Yelp listings, Instagram posts. Knowing which of those actually drives bookings and how much revenue they generate tells you where to put your time. For example, you might find out all your time on social media posts is barely moving the needle, in which case you can put that time towards a channel that is working.

If you are running ads — or thinking about it — this is where the feature really pays for itself. You can see exactly how much revenue each campaign brings in. No more guessing whether that Google Ads spend is working.

This feature isn't on by default — we're enabling it restaurant by restaurant. Submit a support ticket and we'll flip it on for your site.

You'll also need Google Analytics installed to see the data. If you already have it, you're set. If you don't, mention that in your ticket and our team will get you sorted.

You already put work into filling tables. It's worth knowing which of that work is actually doing it. With the whole booking staying on your domain, you can finally see which channels send real reservations, how big those parties are, and what they're worth, then spend your time on the ones that earn it.