How to Create a Restaurant Dashboard in Google Analytics

A great restaurant website does more than just show off mouth-watering photos and list your opening hours, it should be actively bringing customers through the door. A Google Analytics dashboard created specifically for your restaurant will show you exactly how that’s happening or where it’s falling short. This guide will walk you through setting up a simple, high-impact dashboard in Google Analytics 4 with the specific reports you need to make better marketing decisions.

First, Which KPIs Actually Matter for Your Restaurant?

Before you build a dashboard, you need to tell Google Analytics what success looks like for your business. In GA4, these key performance indicators (KPIs) are tracked as "conversions." You can't improve what you don't measure, and for a restaurant, a "user" or a "pageview" doesn't pay the bills. Reservations, orders, and inquiries do.

Here are the most important conversions to set up for your restaurant website:

• Reservations Completed: This is a big one. You can track this by monitoring form submissions on your reservation page or clicks on your third-party booking link (like OpenTable or Resy).

• Online Orders Submitted: If you offer takeout or delivery, tracking the final "Thank You" page of your ordering system is crucial for measuring the success of your online menu.

• Menu Views: Tracking views of your menu page (or downloads of a PDF menu) is a strong indicator of an interested potential customer. It tells you people are actively considering dining with you.

• "Get Directions" Clicks: This measures purchase intent at its peak. Someone clicking for directions is very likely on their way or planning an immediate visit. This is often a click on a Google Maps link.

• Phone Call Clicks: On mobile devices, your phone number should be a clickable link. Tracking these clicks helps you measure inquiries about reservations, large parties, and wait times directly attributable to your website.

Setting these up involves creating events in GA4 and then toggling a switch to mark them as a conversion. While it requires some initial setup in your GA4 Admin panel, it's the foundation for a truly useful dashboard that ties website activity directly to business results.

Step-by-Step: Building Your Restaurant Dashboard in GA4

Once you have your key conversions tracking correctly, you can start building a custom dashboard. In Google Analytics 4, the primary method for creating a shareable, at-a-glance dashboard is by customizing the "Reports" section. This process involves creating a new custom report and adding "cards" that visualize the specific data you need.

Finding the Reporting Canvas

Let's find the right spot to start building. Getting there is straightforward:

1. Log in to your Google Analytics 4 property.

2. On the left-hand navigation menu, click on Reports.

3. Under the main reports section, click on the Library link at the bottom of the list.

4. In the Library, you will see a button labeled + Create new report. Click on this, and from the dropdown, choose Create overview report.

This will give you a blank canvas where you can begin adding "cards." Each card is like a widget - a specific chart or table that answers a critical question about your restaurant's online performance.

The 6 Essential Data Cards for Your Restaurant Dashboard

Now for the fun part: adding the informational cards that will make up your dashboard. The goal is to get a complete picture of your online traffic and how it turns into customers. Click the "Add Cards" button on your blank report to start.

1. Who's Coming and How Often? (Audience Overview)

This set of cards provides a high-level view of your website's audience, just like the number of people walking past your restaurant in a given week.

• Why it matters: It helps you understand the overall size and activity on your digital property. Growing this number means growing your potential customer base.

• Card to add: Search for the "Users" Card and the "New Users" Card.

• Main Metrics: Users, New Users, Sessions.

• How to use it: Look for trends. Is traffic growing month-over-month? If you run a new promotion or get mentioned in the local press, do you see a spike here? This is your digital pulse.

2. How Did They Find Us? (Traffic Acquisition)

This answers one of the most fundamental marketing questions: Which channels are driving people to our website?

• Why it matters: It tells you where to invest your marketing time and money. If most of your customers come from Google searches, you should focus on SEO. If Instagram is a top driver, keep creating great content there.

• Card to add: Look for the card named "New users by Session default channel group." This gives you a clean breakdown of sources.

• Main Channels: You'll see things like Organic Search (Google), Direct (people typing your URL), Organic Social (Instagram, Facebook), and Referral (links from other websites or blogs).

• How to use it: If you see "Organic Search" as a top channel, it confirms that people are finding you by searching for things like "italian food near me" or "best brunch downtown." If "Organic Social" is growing, you know your posts are effectively driving traffic.

3. Are Our Visitors Local? (Geographic Breakdown)

For a physical restaurant, knowing where your online audience is located is incredibly important for understanding your "trade area" and marketing reach.

• Why it matters: It helps you see if you're reaching your local community or attracting visitors from further away. This insight can help you decide where to run local advertisements.

• Card to add: The standard "Users by City" or "Users by Country" card works perfectly. GA will often display this as a map and a table.

• Dimensions: City, Region.

• How to use it: Are the top cities the ones you expect? If you're a local bistro and see significant traffic from a neighboring town, that could be an untapped market for a new ad campaign or a partnership.

4. Mobile or Desktop? (Device Trends)

The vast majority of people looking for a place to eat are doing so on their smartphones. This card validates that assumption and highlights the importance of your site's mobile experience.

• Why it matters: If your site looks or works poorly on a phone, you are losing customers. Period. Knowing that 80-90% of your audience is on mobile reinforces the need for a responsive, fast-loading mobile website.

• Card to add: You'll find a card called "Users by Device Category." It typically shows up as a pie chart.

• Categories: Mobile, Desktop, Tablet.

• How to use it: Check your own website on your phone. Is it easy to find the menu? Can you tap-to-call the phone number easily? Are the reservation buttons obvious? Your device-trends report should be a constant reminder that for restaurants, "mobile-first" is the rule.

5. What Part of Our Website is Most Interesting? (Top Pages Report)

Not all pages on your website are created equal. This card tells you what your visitors find most compelling.

• Why it matters: Knowing which pages are most viewed tells you what your audience cares about most. It's almost always the menu, location/hours, and reservations.

• Card to add: a table report labeled "Views by Page title and screen name" or a variant with 'Page path'.

• Metrics: Views, Users.

• How to use it: Do people view your dinner menu more than your lunch menu? Is your "private events" page getting a lot of traffic? You can use this information to optimize your site, such as adding a "Book our Dinner Special Now!" button directly on the dinner menu page to capitalize on that traffic.

6. Did It All Work? (Conversion Tracking)

This is your scorecard - the single most important part of your restaurant Dashboard. It connects all your website activity to real-world outcomes.

• Why it matters: This is where you measure actual ROI from your marketing efforts. Traffic and clicks are nice.

• Card to add: You should search for a few different "Conversions" cards for key actions like "your_reservation_event_name", and "your_online_order_event_name".

• Metrics: Conversions.

• How to use it: This dashboard component turns abstract web traffic into solid business numbers. Set your date range to "last month" and you can clearly answer, "How many table reservations did our website generate last month?" Now, when discussing digital marketing, you're not debating branding or 'engagement', you're looking at the bottom-line influence of your website on real-world results.

Reviewing, Saving, and Scheduling

Once your dashboard is populated with all the necessary "cards," you can review and rearrange them to tell a complete narrative about your audience in order of importance to you. I personally like 'Conversions' at the very top so my clients can see the outcome first thing when reviewing the results, followed by 'Audience Size', 'Sources' (acquisition), and other supportive metrics. Add any helpful color or context to it thereafter.

When you're finished, don't forget to click Save in the top right. Give the report a clear name like "Restaurant KPIs" and then feel free to share with members of the team. Check back with it weekly, monthly, or even quarterly to check performance. This can serve as your single source of truth when looking to make important decisions about marketing and growth.

Final Thoughts

Building a custom restaurant dashboard in Google Analytics helps you stop guessing about what's working and start making decisions based on real user behavior. By focusing on conversion events like reservations and online orders, you tie every website visitor directly to your restaurant's bottom line. It's the first step to running a more data-driven, efficient business.

Arranging all of these cards and digging through Google Analytics is powerful, but it can still be a distraction from your day-to-day operations. We built Graphed on the idea that insights should be simple and immediate. Once you connect your data sources like Google Analytics, you can just ask questions in plain English, such as “build a dashboard showing my top traffic sources and which ones are driving the most menu downloads.” We instantly build a real-time, professional dashboard for you, so you can spend less time in reporting tools and more time running your restaurant.