Gathering Restaurant Analytics To Raise Your Marketing Game

The restaurant industry is constantly changing—that’s the one thing you can depend on about it. Opening a restaurant will always be a risky business, but you can arm yourself with data and analytics in order to address gaps in the industry with your restaurant and figure out how to market it best. If you have a marketing business, you can also help restaurants create strong brands based on what people are talking about on social media and various restaurant review websites. When you’re trying to stand out in a crowded market, restaurant analytics are your best friend.

With the rise of customer reviews on Google and specialized websites, there is a ton of information available about what people like (and don’t like) about restaurants. While many restauranteurs might dismiss review websites as hubs of bad-faith criticism, there are plenty of thoughtful and useful reviews on there. It is a place where people can address everything from the food to the atmosphere, and by looking into restaurant data in a smart way, you can find the helpful stuff. Today, we’ll go over how to do restaurant data collection and use it to your advantage.

How to Find Restaurant Analytics

Restaurant data and analytics are two different things, but you need to get restaurant data in order to get your own analytics. You can find a lot of predictions and informative articles with restaurant analytics in them, but you should also do your own research when you want to figure out what’s really going on. Instead of looking at national trends, you can choose to collect hyper-local restaurant data.

For every restaurant that closes, there is a new one waiting to open and try to make better use of the space. It’s possible to do that when you’re armed with good and accurate restaurant analytics. There are a few different sectors to consider when you’re collecting restaurant data: pricing, food trends in your city, and customer feelings. For pricing, you should be constantly collecting data in order to have a competitive pricing strategy. This doesn’t necessarily mean making everything cheaper, but understanding how your prices will play with customers based on how similar restaurants (in food style and upscale-ness) price their food.

For assessing the restaurants in your city, you can use restaurant data to analyze what gap your restaurant is filling. Whether you’re doing the collection yourself or your company is doing it to make recommendations to aspiring restauranteurs, it’s important to know what might be missing from the city where you’re opening a restaurant. Even if you’re in your fifth or twentieth successful year, you want to keep using restaurant analytics to be able to market your restaurant as a necessary part of the community.

Data analytics in restaurant industry also come together by collecting online customer reviews. If you get a ton of data about how people are reviewing your restaurant and others, you can look for keywords and find out what the problems and successes of restaurants are, as perceived by customers.

Web Scraping Restaurant Data and Information

Restaurant data can all live in one place because of web scraping. Like IMDb, restaurant review websites pull in restaurant information through web scraping so you can look through all of the different restaurants in the area without going to their specific websites. Web scraping collects publicly available data, like reviews posted to restaurant-specific websites and Google.

If you’re working on restaurant analytics, web scraping is a fantastic way to cut down on your data collection time. Gathering restaurant analytics is a great way to optimize the customer experience through seasonal menus, atmosphere, and effective pricing strategy. However, you don’t want to spend hundreds of hours doing it.

If you’re specifically working on getting user reviews, you might have to copy and paste each review into a document and search for relevant keywords. A web scraper like Scraping Robot can work through web scraping restaurant information in a much shorter amount of time. A web scraper will point to the restaurant data you want, collect all of it, and deliver it to you in a convenient Excel file or .CSV. Then, you can start searching for numbers or keywords that will help your restaurant analytics strategy.

While no one can tell the future, restaurant predictive analytics can help you forecast parts of the year where you’ll have to readjust your menu because of lower restaurant-going overall. This also helps with understanding how customers will react to menu changes based on seasonal availability of various ingredients. As far as restaurant analytics software goes, web scrapers are the best way to get started.

Tips for Restaurant Data Collection

One thing that’s important to know about web scraping is that a lot of websites are taught to very suspicious of it. Web scrapers are robots and don’t necessarily behave in a “human” way on websites. If you want your web scraper to mimic human behavior, you can slow down the requests that your web scraper is making to a more human speed, and also do your restaurant data collection in chunks (as opposed to one giant project). However, websites still might recognize a scraper and ban the IP address associated with the scraper.

Cyber criminals, bad actors on the Internet, and virus software also use bots to collect data they shouldn’t have. Web scraping publicly available data for restaurant analytics is generally fine, but most websites are extra-cautious in order to protect user data.

In order to get around bans, you have to pair a web scraper with a reliable proxy. A proxy is something you can use to hide your IP address. It provides a proxy IP address that masks your personal device’s IP address. This is not only helpful for maintaining anonymity online, but also for working on big web scraping projects.

Proxies are useful for a variety of reasons. They have faster network speeds because you’re able to use it on your own, and they also have higher bandwidth. Proxies also tend to let you choose which country the proxy IP address is located in, so you can get around geographic barrier bans. This can also let you do targeted research in international cities.

There are three main types of proxies: dedicated, semi-dedicated, and rotating. Dedicated and semi-dedicated proxies provide you with one IP address that covers your IP address, but a semi-dedicated one is shared between a few users. This can work if you make your web scraper run more slowly, but the benefit of a web scraper is how fast it can go.

A rotating proxy rotates out new IP addresses as often as you want, so it’s a great option for a web scraper because it’ll just keep going. In order to have a good experience with finding data analytics in restaurant industry, you’ll have to find the perfect proxy.

The Best Tools for Restaurant Data Analytics

In addition to providing high-quality, highly-vetted datacenter proxies, Rayobyte now offers ethically sourced and highly functional residential proxies for beta testers. Residential proxies have IP addresses that look safer to websites because they look like IP addresses that come from an Internet Service Provider. These residential proxies have higher price points because they are so well-vetted, and will be extremely helpful for your restaurant analytics process.

Rayobyte also lets you have a trial period for your proxies. Although there are a ton of free proxies on the Internet that you can try to use for web scraping, there is no guarantee that these proxies will actually help you with restaurant analytics. There are probably a lot of users on the one free proxy, as opposed to just you, so your network speeds will probably be slower. You also might have to deal with more bans because of more users. After your two-day trial period, you can also customize an enterprise plan to suit your business needs.

In addition to a wealth of proxy choice for your web scraping restaurant data needs, Rayobyte has 24/7 customer service to best assist you with your proxy. Proxies aren’t a one-size-fits-all business, and we understand that you have specific needs for your proxy use cases. You can trust in Rayobyte’s proxies and expertise to help you get the most out of your restaurant data collection and restaurant analytics.

Final Thoughts

Even though the restaurant industry is such a volatile business, the wealth of information available online can help you. Restaurant goers feel empowered to share their reviews and experience across a ton of websites—they really want to give advice to other customers and shout out the best places they’ve eaten. Restaurants are also communal spaces that can add a lot to the local scene and act as meeting spaces for a ton of different types of people. Having a regular, go-to restaurant is important for a lot of clubs and groups. In order to make your restaurant a necessary and thriving space for the community, you can easily integrate restaurant analytics into your business plan.