The hospitality industry has never been this active and efficient at finding customers through paid ads and social media. Perhaps the competition has forced hotels and restaurants to do this.
A lot of hotels, motels, and restaurants pay close attention to their social media marketing, SEO, and PPC advertising. There are multiple reasons why restaurants and hotels spend time, energy, and money on digital marketing strategies, such as:
- Stay competitive
- Adopt the latest trends
- Try new marketing tactics
- Fear of missing out (FOMO)
Google ads for restaurants turn out to be an important digital marketing channel that a lot of restaurants understand and include in their marketing plans.
However, there are still restaurants that struggle to figure out how to run Google ads. Therefore, we took the responsibility of educating those restaurants on the topic.
Let’s learn how to run Google ads for restaurants.
Why Google ads matter to restaurants
Google ads are an essential marketing, sales, and acquisition channel for restaurants and hotels across the globe. Let’s crack this topic open and try to understand why Google ads matter so much to restaurants:
1. To stay relevant in the market
It’s no surprise that the time has been passing swiftly these days. Brands and influencers find it challenging to stay relevant in the market. Google ads are one of the best ways to remind customers about the restaurant. Restaurants can’t always advertise their menu or hot favorite items. Instead, wishing holidays, such as Christmas, New Year, Halloween, and Easter can be a great way to stay relevant in the market.
2. Promote new offers and deals
One of the reasons why Google ads matter for restaurants is because it provides them the opportunity to promote new deals, packages, and offers. For instance, a local restaurant in the city can target the local audience with their buffet deals. Similarly, a restaurant can promote its deals and packages for couple dates, rehearsal dinners, and weddings.
3. Retargeting the audience during holidays
Retargeting means remarketing to the audience that has shown some interest in the seller’s website and the purpose is to reengage and convert this time. Usually, retargeting is a way of sending a gentle reminder to potential customers about the brand. Moreover, Google retargeting ad campaigns can be used to attract a familiar audience, especially during the holiday season.
4. Give tough time to the competition
You have to be on your toes to beat the competition in the digital marketing landscape no matter what your industry is. Restaurants need to run Google ads, especially during the hot seasons to win customers and stay competitive. A lot of people use Google to search for restaurants near them or in a specific area. This opens up the opportunity for restaurants to use Google ads to display their restaurant name at the top of the SERP.
5. Add an extra customer acquisition channel
Social media is one of the major customer acquisition channels besides YELP. However, a lot of users aren’t active on social media or have no idea what the heck is YELP. So, all they have is a default Google search engine on their smartphone or PC’s browser. Running Google ads for restaurants allows restaurants to build an identity as well as provides an extra customer acquisition channel to the restaurants.
6. Boost online bookings during the season
Online bookings through SEO and social media are worth a shot. In fact, they do work very well for most restaurants that know how to juggle both search engine optimization and social media marketing. However, a Google ads campaign for restaurants during the season can serve as an icing on the cake.
These are some of the reasons why Google ads matter so much for restaurants.
Best types of Google ads for restaurants
There are several types of ads offered by Google. However, every ad type won’t work for restaurants. To launch a successful Google ads campaign, one must opt for only the suitable Google ad types for the restaurant business.
Here are some of the best types of Google ads to run a successful ad campaign for a restaurant:
Call-only ads
The first and foremost on the list is call-only ads. It’s best suited for businesses, such as restaurants, takeaways, hotels, and motels where consumers can book or order on the phone. The reason is that it entices the consumer to get the required information within seconds just by dialing the phone, which the ad does too. All it takes from the user is to click on the ads if the person is interested in the ad.
It’s a Google ad type that works for restaurants probably better than any other ad type. The way it works is that when the visitor clicks on this ad, it takes the user to the mobile phone dial screen where the user can quickly call the restaurant for booking or information.
Local services ads
Local service ads are crucial for restaurants and hotels. These ads allow advertisers to receive leads directly from potential customers via Google search. The local services ads send the leads through phone calls and messages. These ads are quite effective in targeting local and territorial potential customers.
The main reason why this type of ad works very well is that these ads show up in the Google result pages when certain keywords are used for search, especially when involving queries related to phone numbers, addresses, and locations.
Search ads
Every restaurant and hotel wants to pop up in the Google search when customers search for “best place to dine in downtown LA” or “best pizza restaurant in NYC.” Restaurants strive to get into search engine marketing by hiring both in-house SEO experts and freelance SEOs, but they don’t want to miss out on any opportunity whatsoever. Therefore, they go after Google search ads after.
Search ads are the most popular type of Google ads that appear in the Google result pages when a user searches for something on Google. These ads are text-based adverts that show up on the Google SERP and are known for their keyword-oriented targeting. Companies utilize search ads to stay ahead of their competition and target low to high CPC keywords for generating sales.
Display ads
Display ads are the banner ads that show up on the websites and apps in different sizes. These types of ads are quite suitable for restaurants as they allow restaurants to display pictures of food, tables, sitting areas, etc. The design of the display ads appeals to the visitors, which is the whole point of such ad campaigns.
These ads are smartly designed to attract clickers (or potential customers). However, the reason why display ads are successful is because the algorithm that runs these ads understands the intent of the website visitors, which ensures that ads relevant to the user behavior are displayed to the user.
For instance, if a user searches about laptop prices on Google, this person is likely to see a ton of laptop ads on the websites and apps where Google ads are displayed.
Video ads
Video ads are yet another interesting opportunity for restaurants to reach out to the target audience and make an impact. Since video ads are visually appealing, they can entice the potential audience to take action more than any other type of ad.
Keep in mind that Google’s video ads show up on YouTube or anywhere else on the web where the YouTube video is embedded. Usually, a video ad appears before, during, and after the YouTube videos. These types of ads work well for most B2C and B2B businesses with the help of the campaign’s objective and behavioral targeting.
So, these are some of the best types of Google ads that restaurants should consider when launching their Google ads campaign.
How to run Google ads for a restaurant
It’s crucial to understand that every step of running a Google ads campaign is important – no wonder every Google ad campaign doesn’t succeed. Even though, all these steps look quite simple, the majority of the advertisers have to go through trial-and-error to succeed.
Here are the steps involved in running a Google ads campaign for a restaurant:
1. Create your Google Ads account
To get started with Google ads, go and create your Google ads account. To do so, visit ads.google.com and click on the Start Now button.
That’s the first step of the onboarding process. Provide all the necessary details to set up the Google ads account.
Once you have done it properly, proceed to the next step.
2. Provide business details
Write down the required business details, such as the business name and what you’d like to advertise on Google. In this case, provide the details of the restaurant you’re running Google ads for.
The reason why it’s important to tell what you want to advertise is that it assists Google in understanding the purpose behind the campaign.
Now, Google will ask you to link up your accounts, such as YouTube channel, Google business profile, or phone number. Don’t hesitate to skip this part if it isn’t relevant at the moment and come back later to add them when required.
3. Select your campaign goal
It’s one of the most crucial steps in running a Google ads campaign. The campaign goal refers to the purpose of creating the campaign. Choose your campaign goal-wise. A Google ads campaign without a clear goal doesn’t take off.
It’s the stage where advertisers decide or reveal the intention behind the campaign. Pay attention to choosing your campaign’s goal. Advertisers usually choose purchase, lead generation, phone call leads, page views, or brand awareness. In the case of a restaurant, phone call leads seems the most relevant option to pick.
Advertisers can explore more campaign goals if the commonly used campaign goals aren’t relevant to the strategy.
4. Pick the campaign type
After successfully selecting the campaign’s goal, the next up is the campaign type. Start exploring the option by clicking on the other campaign types’ three-dotted options on the top right of the page.
You’ll land on the Choose Campaign‘s page where you can select what type of campaign you want to run for your restaurant. More importantly, this part provides you a chance to decide where you want to display your Google ad, for example, Google Search, Display ads, YouTube, Discovery, or others.
Most of the restaurant owners would pick Google search – so should you.
5. Insert the best keywords for targeting
At this stage, you have to provide the keywords for the ad campaign to target the potential audience. Google ads suggest some initial keywords based on your website URL but feel free to ignore those and try to come up with fresh ones.
You can’t simply write one or two-word random keywords to target. Google allows advertisers to enter keywords in three patterns. It’s necessary to comprehend that if you mention the keyword without any bracket or quotation marks, it will be considered broad targeting. When you enter keywords in the quotation marks, it will be a phrase match targeting. Moreover, if you use brackets [], it would mean that you want exact match targeting.
Don’t forget to select the location, audience, language, and networks of the potential ad audience.
6. Create an ad
Now, it’s time to create a Google ad for the restaurant. The Google ad setup will ask you to provide the following details:
- The website URL where you want to drive the ad traffic
- The URL to display on the ad,
- The headline of the ad,
- The ad description
- Sitelinks if necessary
It’s important to understand that Google provides a list of options for advertisers to make their ads as relevant and appealing as possible. Make sure that you make the most of this step before jumping on to the next one.
7. Adjust bidding strategy
After creating the Google ad for a restaurant, the next step is to make your bidding strategy. In simple words, it’s a method of informing Google what we want to achieve from this campaign.
Restaurant owners or ad managers can select conversion, clicks, or any other option from the list. However, most advertisers choose between clicks and conversion as their focus for the campaign. Furthermore, the ad manager or expert can also set a maximum CPC limit for the campaign at this step just to make sure that Google doesn’t charge costs per click more than the set limit.
8. Set the budget
An important step in running a Google ads campaign for a restaurant is to set the budget for the ad campaign. The Google ad expert doesn’t recommend going with Google’s recommended budget strategy. Every beginner must go with a custom budgeting strategy to have full control over their ad spending.
So, it’ll be wise to choose the “Set custom budget” option and have complete control over your restaurant ad campaign.
9. Launch the ad campaign
You’re almost there with your Google ads campaign for the restaurant. After setting the bidding and budgeting strategies, you have to provide the payment details to proceed. After providing the required payment details, you can submit the ad campaign for approval.
It will take a while before the ad campaign gets’ approved. Have patience and wait for the campaign approval. The ad will go live as soon as the campaign is approved.
10. Analyze campaign performance
It’s vital to analyze every ad campaign’s performance. The Google ad campaign for the restaurant is no different. Start analyzing this restaurant ad campaign performance after a few days. You can also go through the campaign’s performance report after the completion of the campaign.
Such in-depth analysis gives advertisers an inside-out report on the campaign’s effectiveness and provides an opportunity to ponder on the areas that need improvement in the next campaigns.
So, these are the steps of starting a Google ads campaign for a restaurant.
Common mistakes to avoid when running Google ads for a restaurant
Here are some of the mistakes advertisers should avoid:
i. Not tracking conversions properly: Failing to track conversions accurately means you can’t measure the effectiveness of your ads. This can lead to a wasted budget on underperforming strategies. It’ll be a shame if one of the campaigns is working well, but you have no idea which one it is.
ii. Focusing on a single type of keywords: Relying solely on one keyword type limits your reach and audience diversity. A lot of advertisers make the mistake of using just exact or broad keywords in the campaign. Diversifying keywords helps capture different search intents and improve campaign performance.
iii. Underfunding a campaign: An insufficient budget can prevent your ads from reaching their full potential, limiting impressions and clicks. This often results in missed opportunities and reduced ROI.
iv. No A/B testing the ads: A/B testing is a method of analyzing case A versus case B. It gives you an idea of which case or variant performs well. Without A/B testing, you won’t know which ad variations perform best. Regular testing helps optimize ad copy, images, and CTAs for better results.
v. Selecting the wrong goal: Choosing an inappropriate campaign goal can misalign your ad strategy with your business objectives. This mistake leads to inefficient spending and poor campaign outcomes. It’s a common mistake among the rookie advertisers.
Wrapping up
Running Google ad campaigns for restaurants doesn’t necessarily mean that you always have to use a specific type of Google ad. Try to experiment with other types instead. The experimentation gives you a chance to understand which kind of Google ad works well for you.
Always use attractive, common, and appealing call-to-actions, headlines, and descriptions to make it easier for the audience to understand and respond to the ad.
Feel free to contact us if you’re looking for an ads expert or digital marketer to run your Google ads campaigns.
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