(co-authors: Jackson Lo and Yazdan Rabadi) 

Many of us keep a tab on our analytics data every day, every hour or even every minute. One of the pain points for an agency working with hundreds analytics account is that there is a ton of back and forth between web properties, or if you’re like me, have multiple tabs open for each profile. Yikes! There must be a better way.

The process for setting up individual web properties is as follows:

1. Create new web property/profile
2. Implement analytics tracking code in the header of each site
3. Test, then onto the next
4. Repeat steps 1-3

Note: there is a limit of 50 web properties/profiles you can assign to a single Analytics account. Keep that in mind when you’re organizing your clients’ data. 

Here at Menu.ca, we set up individual web properties for each of our restaurants. We also do the following:

• Universal Analytics tracking
• E-commerce tracking
• Custom events tracking – click to call
• Goal tracking and funnel visualization – completed orders

The headache kicks in when you have all these web properties added and you need to go into each one to check on the traffic for that website. This becomes a tedious process. What happens if you end up working with a hundred or even thousands of businesses? What if all you wanted to know is to check up on the health of the traffic as a ‘quick snapshot’ for everyone?

Luckily, with the Google Analytics API, there is a way to bring all your web property data onto one page. Awesome right? With it, we were able to extract only the pertinent information that we needed to run those ‘quick snapshots’ for all our clients. From an acquisition and conversion standpoint, this is what we wanted to know for a given time frame:

• Visits
• # Transactions
• Total revenue
• $ per visit value
• transaction to visits ratio
• Mobile visits and % mobile visits
• Mobile transactions and % mobile transactions
• Traffic broken out by sources: Google (organic), Urbanspoon, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, (Partner websites), Direct and Other

For a group of web properties (or accounts), we were also able to pull date and time metrics to glean on which days of the week people were placing online orders on. Things we were able to see on a day to day basis:

• Average visits 
• Average transactions
• Average revenue
• Average order value
• $ per visit
• transaction to visits ratio

Here’s a peak of how it could look for average visits, average transactions and average revenue for a cluster of web properties:

For a select group of restaurants, they were averaging more revenue on Tuesday, Friday and Saturdays. Neat eh? The Google Analytics API is pretty awesome. But, the fun doesn’t stop there

A couple weeks ago, the team at Menu.ca came together and discussed how we could make our custom dashboard even more ‘awesome’. We started toying around with the assumption that people will likely order in more when the weather is not the greatest. It’s a big assumption of course, but we wanted to see what we could do with weather data and overlaying it with Google Analytics data.

Using weather data from WeatherSource.com, we were able to grab daily activities for a given period of time. The weather line is marked in a light blue shade and is measured out in millimeters of precipitation for a given day. The data is not perfect, but it is the best source we’ve been able to find that is free and easily accessible.

It may not happen in all cases, but for a select few restaurants that we are looking at here, there is definitely correlation between precipitation and online orders. On a bad day, people will stay in and order food online (or by phone – we are not tracking phone calls unless they were click to call. We track those as simple events).

It’s incredible how much you can extract from Google Analytics using their API and merging it with third-party data like the weather. Not only that, but combining a greater number of web properties and displaying them on one single page to get a quick snapshot of what’s happening.

Jackson Lo

Jackson is the manager of Analytics and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for MENU.CA. He is heavily involved in the Local Search Marketing community and has helped many small-medium sized local businesses win online.

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