Restaurants get some of the cheapest traffic in Google Ads. Restaurants and food averages $2.05 per click and a $30.57 cost per lead, against an all industry average of $5.42 and $66.69. Only arts and entertainment is cheaper.
Those figures come from a study of 13,474 US search campaigns. Cheap clicks are welcome, but restaurant margins are thin enough that cheap is not automatically profitable. A $30 lead against a $45 average cover at a 5% net margin does not work.
Which is why most restaurants should not advertise a table at all.
What to advertise instead of your menu
Regular covers come from your Google Business Profile, your reviews and the map pack, mostly for free. Paying for a search from someone choosing where to eat tonight means competing with every restaurant nearby on the thinnest transaction you sell.
Ads earn their place on the higher value things:
| What you advertise | Value | Worth paying for? |
|---|---|---|
| A table tonight | One cover, thin margin | Rarely. Your profile does this free. |
| Private dining and events | Hundreds to thousands | Yes. This is the case for ads. |
| Christmas and party bookings | Large group spend | Yes, and book early |
| Catering and functions | Highest | Yes, and it is underadvertised |
| Direct delivery orders | Margin saved vs aggregators | Often yes, see below |
What this means for you: a private dining enquiry worth $2,000 justifies a $30 lead comfortably. A table for two does not.
Direct delivery is the clearest win
Delivery aggregators take a substantial commission on every order. An order placed directly on your own site keeps that.
So the arithmetic changes completely. If an aggregator takes 25% of a $40 order, that is $10 per order you keep by winning the customer directly. At a $2.05 cost per click, direct ordering ads can pay for themselves quickly, and the customer becomes yours to remarket to rather than the platform’s.
Bid on your own brand plus delivery terms, and make sure your own ordering page is at least as easy as the app.
Seasonality is where the money is
Christmas party bookings get researched months ahead. So do wedding and event enquiries. A restaurant advertising private dining in September for December has almost no competition and a high value enquiry.
The same applies to any date driven occasion in your market. The pattern is always the same: advertise early, when the searcher is planning rather than deciding.
Outside those windows, reduce rather than pause so Smart Bidding stays settled. Our post on bidding strategies covers why restarts cost you.
Track the booking, not the click
Restaurant conversions are reservations, order completions and enquiry forms. Track all three separately and give them honest values.
- A reservation is worth your average cover multiplied by party size, times your margin.
- A direct order is worth the commission you did not pay.
- An event enquiry is worth far more than either and should be the primary conversion if you want that business.
If every one of those is marked primary with no value, the bidding will chase whichever is cheapest, which is always the single table. Our guide to conversion tracking covers the setup.
The negatives that matter
- Recipes and cooking. How to make, recipe, ingredients. Enormous volume, zero intent to eat out.
- Jobs. Chef jobs, waiter, hiring, salary.
- Aggregator brand names, unless you are deliberately bidding to win the order back.
- Franchise and business terms. How to open a restaurant, equipment, suppliers.
- Free. Free food, vouchers, giveaway hunters.
Set location targeting to presence, not presence or interest, and keep the radius to a realistic travel distance. Our post on negative keywords covers the list.
How to choose an agency for a restaurant
- “What should we advertise?” If the answer is the menu, they have not looked at your margins. Events, catering and direct ordering are the case.
- “What is our Google Business Profile doing?” A good agency fixes the free channel before selling you a paid one.
- “How will we value a reservation versus an event enquiry?” They should differ by an order of magnitude.
- “When do we start advertising Christmas?” Months earlier than most operators expect.
- “What would make you tell us to stop?” No answer means they are selling.
Our post on choosing a Google Ads agency covers contracts and management pricing covers fee models.
Common questions
Should a single restaurant run Google Ads at all?
For covers, usually not. For private dining, events, catering and direct delivery, often yes. The channel is worth it where the transaction is large.
Why is our cost per lead so low but profit unchanged?
Because cheap leads on a thin margin product still lose money. A $30 lead on a $45 cover at 5% net is not viable. Judge on margin, not on cost per lead.
Is it worth bidding on our own name?
If aggregators are bidding on it, usually yes. An order placed on your own site keeps the commission, which pays for the click many times over.
What about new openings?
This is the exception where advertising covers makes sense. A new restaurant has no reviews and no profile history, so paid visibility buys the first weeks while the free channels build.
How long before it works?
Fast for direct ordering. Slower for events, because those enquiries convert weeks or months later.
Where to go from here
Work out the margin on your average cover and on your average private dining booking. Then look at what you are advertising. If the answer is covers, you are buying the least profitable thing you sell at the same price as the most profitable.
Our Google Ads management page explains how we work, our case studies show the results, and you can get in touch for a straight read on whether this channel fits you.
