Google Ads for restaurants: a practical guide to campaigns that fill tables

Google Ads will take a restaurant's money very efficiently. Its defaults are built to work for any business — a plumber, a software company, an online shop — and a restaurant that accepts them usually pays to be shown to people in the wrong place, at the wrong time, searching for the wrong thing. The ads themselves are rarely the problem. The settings are.

This guide is about those settings, in the order the decisions actually arise. If you are still deciding whether to advertise at all, start with Google Ads vs SEO — this piece assumes you have a reason to.

Guests do not search for "restaurant" in the abstract. They search for something they need to organise: a wedding venue, a Christmas party for twenty, a birthday dinner, somewhere open late, a new place nearby. Each of those is a different campaign with a different audience, timing and landing page.

• Weddings and showcases — couples comparing venues months ahead, often from outside your area
• Private dining and groups — someone organising for others, who needs capacity, a menu and a price
• Christmas parties — teams deciding from September onwards, with a short booking window
• New and late menus — people nearby, often deciding the same evening
• Openings and relaunches — a restaurant with no reviews or ranking history yet
• Quieter services — specific days and times with tables to fill

The higher the value of one booking, the more an ad click is worth. A wedding or a private-dining enquiry can justify a cost per click that would never pay back on a table for two. That is why most restaurant budgets do best spent on occasions first and everyday dining last.

Google Ads offers several campaign types. For restaurants, two do most of the work, and the choice between them is mostly a choice between control and reach.

Local campaigns, which many older guides still recommend for restaurants, no longer exist as a separate type. Google upgraded them to Performance Max in 2022, which is why Performance Max is the campaign type that can now place ads on Google Maps.

Source: Google Ads Help — About Performance Max campaigns — The channels Performance Max serves on and when Google recommends using it.

Source: Google Ads Help — Local campaign upgrades to Performance Max — Google's 2022 announcement that Local campaigns were upgraded to Performance Max.

Two Dublin restaurant campaigns we've run show what those different jobs look like in Google Ads' own figures. Both restaurants are anonymous, and the figures are exactly as Google Ads recorded them.

Read side by side, they show two different shapes of campaign rather than a better and a worse one. The wedding campaign was narrow — one occasion, one landing page — and paid more per click. The opening campaigns were broad, produced far more impressions and paid less per click. Which shape is right depends on the job, which is why the occasion comes before the keyword.

Location targeting has a setting most restaurant accounts never open. By default, Google shows ads to people in your target area and to people who have shown interest in it — someone in Cork reading about Dublin, for example. For some campaigns that is exactly right; for others it is wasted money.

Set the area to the distance guests realistically travel for that occasion, not the whole city or the whole country. A radius around the venue is often a better fit than a county boundary.

Source: Google Ads Help — About advanced location options — The difference between Presence and Presence or interest, and how to change it.

By default, campaigns run all day, every day. A late-menu campaign that runs at nine in the morning, or a quiet-Tuesday campaign that runs on Saturday, spends budget on the wrong guests. Set ad schedules around the window in which the decision is made — which is not always when you are open. People plan Christmas parties during office hours; they decide on a late dinner around nine at night.

Two budget details matter. Google can spend more than the daily budget on some days and less on others, pacing towards a monthly total; and campaigns with ad schedules still pace towards that monthly total. Set a hard monthly cap you are comfortable with, and a review date, before any campaign starts.

Source: Google Ads Help — About ad scheduling — How ad schedules work and how they affect budget pacing.

Negative keywords tell Google which searches to exclude. Without them, a restaurant pays for clicks from people who were never going to book. Every restaurant account needs a starting list:

Then read the search terms report weekly for the first month and add anything irrelevant. The list grows fastest at the start and settles after a few weeks.

Source: Google Ads Help — About negative keywords — How negative keywords match, including the fact that they do not match close variants.

The single most expensive mistake in restaurant ads is sending every click to the homepage. Someone who searched for a Christmas party venue wants the Christmas page: dates, menus, prices per head, capacity and a way to enquire. If they have to hunt for it, many will go back to the results and click the next ad — which you have already paid for.

If the page does not exist yet, build it before the campaign. It will also help the occasion rank organically, which is what eventually reduces how much you need to spend. See private dining pages for the structure.

Linking your Google Business Profile to Google Ads lets ads show your address, distance and a map through location assets. For a restaurant, where the guest's next question is usually "how far is it?", that matters. Call assets add a phone button; sitelink assets can send people straight to the menu, the private dining page or the booking page.

The link only works if the profile is accurate. An ad showing last season's hours or an old phone number wastes the click and the guest's trust. Check the profile before linking it.

Source: Google Ads Help — Link your Google Business Profile to Google Ads — How location assets use your Business Profile.

Restaurant ads have an honest measurement problem: the click is recorded, the booking often is not. A guest clicks, reads the menu, and books by phone or walks in. Bookings completed on a third-party reservation platform may not report back to Google Ads at all. Count what you can see, and say plainly what you cannot.

• Enquiry form submissions on your own site — the most reliable conversion for weddings, events and groups
• Clicks on the booking button, as a signal of intent rather than a confirmed booking
• Calls from ads, counted only when they last longer than a minimum duration you set
• Calls from your website's phone number, tracked separately from calls made directly from the ad
• Bookings imported from the reservation platform, where the platform supports it

Keep brand campaigns out of the headline numbers. People searching your name were already looking for you; their clicks are cheap and their conversions flatter every report. And remember that ads do not improve organic rankings — the paid and organic systems are separate.

Source: Google Ads Help — Measure calls from ads — Call conversion tracking and minimum call duration.

If your restaurant already has a Google Ads account, these are the first things worth checking. None of them needs specialist knowledge; all of them can be done from the account in about ten minutes.

What we check before a new campaign spends anything

• One clear goal per campaign: enquiries, bookings or awareness
• Keywords and locations chosen for intent, not volume
• The landing page and booking route checked on a phone
• Conversion tracking set up for the enquiries and bookings that can be tracked
• A starting budget agreed in advance — nothing is spent without the restaurant's approval
• An honest no, if the kitchen, floor or booking route cannot take more bookings yet

Ads cannot create demand. If nobody is searching for the occasion in your area, no budget will change that. And ads cannot fix the foundations: if the kitchen or floor cannot take more bookings, if the Business Profile has the wrong hours, or if the booking route loses people on a phone, more paid traffic only makes the leak more expensive. Fix those first — the ads will work harder when you do.

Written by

Alex Opsenica

Founder, Moolah Media

Founder of Moolah Media, a founder-led restaurant marketing specialist based in Ireland, working with restaurants worldwide on websites, SEO and Google Maps, and Google Ads. Around 20 years in hospitality, including hands-on restaurant management.

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