Radar food & dining playbook

by Radar Team on March 7, 2019

Industry-leading food & dining apps use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

In this playbook, we explain how the smartest product and marketing teams are using Radar to:

Change the in-app experience when a user is at a restaurant
Send contextual push notifications when a user is at a restaurant
Power order-ahead and delivery
Build segments based on place visits
Understand whether users are opening the app in a restaurant
And more

Radar overview

Radar allows you to add location context and tracking to your apps with just three steps and a few lines of code:

Configure context types. Create custom geofences, enable Places (place, chain, and category detection), enable Insights (home, work, and traveling detection), or enable Regions (country, state, DMA, and postal code detection).
Integrate SDK. Integrate the SDK. In the foreground, change the in-app experience based on user context. In the background, listen for events. Or, before integrating, test with our toolkit apps for iOS and Android.
Enable integrations. Create a webhook or enable server-side integrations to send Radar events and user context to other systems.

For food & dining use cases, you might enable the following context types:

Create custom geofences with tag restaurant, tied to restaurant ID, to generate user.entered_geofence events
Enable Places to generate user.entered_place events for specific chains, including competitors for geo-conquesting
Enable Insights to generate user.entered_home and user.started_traveling events

With these tools, let's get started!

Example 1: Change the in-app experience when a user is at a restaurant

After creating geofences tied to restaurant IDs or enabling Places for specific chains, you can check geofence or place state to determine if a user is at a restaurant.

You can then change the in-app experience, showing content specific to that restaurant, unlocking coupons, and so on.

Radar.trackOnce { (status, location, events, user) in
    user?.geofences?.forEach { (geofence) in
        if geofence.tag == "restaurant" {
            // user is at restaurant, change in-app experience
        }
    }
}

Radar.trackOnce { (status, location, events, user) in
    if user?.place?.hasChain("mcdonalds") {
        // user is at McDonald's, change in-app experience
    }
}

Contextual in-app experiences can improve the user experience, increase conversion, and increase engagement.

Example 2: Send contextual push notifications when a user is at a restaurant

You can send push notifications in a marketing automation integration like Braze, Iterable, Urban Airship, or Leanplum, or in a custom webhook.

For example, you can trigger a push notification when a user enters a geofence with tag restaurant or enters a place with chain mcdonalds. In Braze:

Contextual push notifications can increase engagement, increase spend, and even attract customers away from competitors when used for geo-conquesting.

Example 3: Power order-ahead and delivery

You can also power order-ahead and delivery, listening for events server-side with a webhook, Google or Firebase Cloud Function, or AWS Lambda Function:

app.post('/webhooks/radar', (req, res, next) => {
    const event = req.body.event;
    if (event.type === 'user.entered_geofence' &&
        event.geofence.tag === 'restaurant') {
        // user is near restaurant, trigger pickup flow
    }
});

Example 4: Build segments based on place visits

You can build segments in a customer data platform integration like Segment or mParticle, export events from the Radar dashboard, or send events to AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, or another data warehouse through a custom webhook.

For example, you can build a segment of users who performed the event user.entered_place with chain mcdonalds more than 3 times in the last 30 days. In mParticle:

Personalization with segments can improve the user experience and increase engagement.

Example 5: Understand whether users are opening the app at a restaurant

Finally, you can enrich behavioral events like app installs, app opens, searches, or purchases with location context using behavioral analytics integrations like Amplitude and Mixpanel.

For example, you can enrich app open events with geofence state to understand whether users are opening the app at a restaurant.

Enriching behavioral events with location context can help you understand how users engage with your app in the real world.

These are just a few examples of ways that you can use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

Ready to take your food & dining app to the next level? Sign up or contact our sales team. We can't wait to see what you'll build.

See our other industry playbooks for more examples and inspiration: