The Results

To start, we looked at their analytics to identify how their two main target audiences, young professionals and couples or groups in their 40s and 50s, were interacting with the business. From there, we worked to identify several ways that the Gladwin Brothers could help increase their audience engagement.

To do this effectively, we needed to organise and restructure their Google Analytics to help both us and the brothers find, collect, and utilise the data more easily. For example, we went through the process of setting up and tracking visitor, customer, and booking data to give valuable insights into how engaged their users were.

This kind of information was previously inaccessible or stored across several different accounts, and two of their restaurants even shared the same analytics which resulted in inaccurate data reporting. Now, all data for the Gladwin Brothers is stored logically and accurately, meaning that they can more easily identify which strategies are working through tangible data and help make better business decisions moving forwards.

We also performed a full user experience audit on the websites for each of the restaurants and the central Gladwin Brothers site. It was here where we made the most changes, identifying several areas where the user experience was unoptimized and causing potential customers to drop off.

The Google Analytics data showed that users were dropping off during the booking process as it implemented a two-part form process, in which the initial booking details were not editable at the second stage. This resulted in people restarting the process when they wanted to change the date, time of their booking or the number of people attending. On the site for the Sussex restaurant, we saw that 93% of the visitors had left the site during the booking processes, with the other 7% bouncing between booking forms. To help reduce user friction, we recommended that they allow users to change their initial booking information in the second stage.

We also found inconsistencies throughout their branding and display across the sites. For example, the Black Lamb restaurant was previously called the Black Sheep, but both names were frequently referred to throughout the website. Additionally, there were some technical issues preventing the loading of certain pages or the submission and reception of contact forms.

We provided a report for all the technical problems that we encountered which was passed to their website developer for improvements as well as a list of CRO improvements required to boost success. Since our changes were made, we’ve been able to track more than 300 additional bookings for the Sussex restaurant alone.