4 Reasons Google Analytics 4 Will Improve Your Escape Room

If you're an escape room owner who utilizes Google Analytics, you must upgrade to Google Analytics 4 before July 2023. It can be a little trickier to set up, but we are happy to report that the improved data can benefit the escape room industry!

As the deadline approaches, we have slowly implemented it for our escape room clients. So far, we are pleased with our Resova integration and our Bookeo integration.

This post will look at four Google Analytics 4 features that will make the time and effort spent upgrading worth it for your escape room.

1) Track Your Online Sales Funnel Per Room

Google Analytics 4 is an event first system based on e-commerce. That means we get to send data from the booking system (Resova or Bookeo) to Google Analytics 4 to track the online sales "funnel".

Resova allows us to setup tracking for "add to cart", "begin checkout", and "purchase".

After a few days, we then get to sort that data and view the following metrics on a per escape room basis in the Ecommerce Purchases report:

• Item Views (individual escape room products)
• Add-to-carts
• Cart-to-view-rate
• Amount of purchases
• Purchase-to-view-rate
• Purchase amount
• and more!

We have scrambled this data a bit to protect our client, but there is even more data, like the exact dollar amount earned in this chart!

We can optimize your website even better when we have the correct data. Here is a chart that positions the number of views against the amount of add-to carts. Lots of strategies and adjustments can be determined by analyzing this chart alone!

2) Track What Actions People Are Doing

Optimizing the sales funnel is excellent, but how about understanding how many people interact with your website? If many people are opening your escape room website but not scrolling down to read more then, we have a problem!

Google Analytics 4 allows us to see broad events such as "view_promotion", and "user_engagement" for optimization and advertising retargeting purposes (more in the section on re-marketing).

When it comes to effectively marketing your escape room, we want as many people as possible to engage with your website (i.e., read descriptions, scroll, click around, etc.). When they engage, we can convince them that your escape room is the one to book and push them to the checkout funnel.

If they are clicking away really fast, then we know we need to improve the content on your website or the structure to get more people to engage.

3) Build Incredible Re-marketing Audiences

Since Google Analytics 4 tracks which events a website visitor triggers, it opens us up to incredible audience building for our advertising campaigns.

In this screenshot, we are creating an audience of 3,800 people in the past 30 days that viewed an escape room product (not the home page - these folks got to an escape room page) but did not check out.

This seems like the right kind of audience to show a re-marketing ad to!

Precise, high intent, already knows your brand, and cost-effective advertising is now enabled! Escape Room advertising is only getting better.

4) Understand Where Your Website Visits Are Coming From

While Google Analytics has always been able to tell you where your traffic is coming from, the new approach for "new users by default channel grouping" has been much more helpful for us.

Since we are now sending detailed event data about the checkout process - picking apart, the sales funnel to decode which channel (Direct, Social, Paid Search, etc.) is converting is one tactic that utilizes this data.

Maybe paid search is getting a lot of add-to carts but not many checkouts? Understanding where your visitors are coming from in Google Analytics 4 is critical when optimizing your escape room website.

When we setup our escape room marketing system for our clients, Google Analytics 4 setup is included in the initial configuration (it helps us optimize our advertising campaigns and achieve our 5x ROAS guarantee goal).

If you feel like you could be doing more for your escape room marketing, we would love to connect with you!

Growing escape rooms is not only our passion - but our expertise!