Regular monitoring and evaluation of rangeland restoration outcomes is necessary for accountability, adaptive management throughout the restoration process, and informing future project design. Monitoring and evaluating restoration outcomes can help restoration practitioners and land managers identify restoration successes and failures. Collecting information about differences in potential vegetation productivity in restored areas can help understand and predict these different outcomes. Here, we provide a decision-tree based framework for designing monitoring programs for restoration projects. We emphasize the need to collect land potential information to help evaluate and contextualize restoration outcomes. We then highlight a mobile phone application that can be used to collect basic land potential information with minimal time and training requirements.