The culinary industry is already having a cutthroat competition. In such a competitive niche, having a booming online presence is very much required. Pay-Per-Click advertising, especially on platforms like Google Ads and social media, has emerged as a powerful tool for restaurants to attract new customers, fill tables, and drive more revenue.
However, launching campaigns and seeing clicks isn’t enough. You may wanna know whether these clicks are converting into returns, don’t you? Well, many restaurant owners pour money into PPC without understanding its effectiveness clearly. They might see an increase in website traffic or phone calls, yet struggle to convert them into reservations.
In this article, you will learn how you can track your return on investment from your restaurant’s PPC campaigns. You will also learn how to convert your website traffic and phone calls into reservations, walk-ins, or online orders.
Tracking ROI for Your Restaurant PPC Campaigns: Why Monitoring Your ROI Is Essential?
A PPC campaign is an investment for your restaurant’s future. But before investing, you need to understand the financial impact it may carry. According to companies offering PPC services for restaurants, robust ROI tracking helps you in the following ways:
Optimizing Ad Spend
You need to identify which campaigns, keywords, and ad creatives are generating the most profit. This will help you reallocate your budget to maximize returns.
Improve Campaign Performance
Tracking your PPC campaign’s ROI will help you highlight underperforming elements and make data-driven adjustments to improve targeting, messaging, and bidding strategies.
Justify Marketing Budget
It also helps you present clear, quantifiable evidence of the PPC campaign’s effectiveness to stakeholders and business partners. This further makes it easier for you to secure marketing investments for the future.
Understand Customer Behaviour
You will also gain insights into how potential customers interact with your website and what motivates them to visit your restaurant.
Have a Competitive Edge
By understanding what works, you will be able to move ahead of your competitors who are still guessing about their online marketing strategies.
Challenges Involved in Tracking the ROI of a Restaurant’s PPC Campaign
Monitoring ROI for your restaurant isn’t as easy as it seems to be. The customer journey is often more complex with respect to a restaurant. Here are some aspects that you need to keep in mind:
Offline Conversions:
Many restaurant conversions happen offline. A customer sees an ad, calls to book a table, or simply walks in after being attracted to a particular ad.
Delayed Conversions:
A customer might see an ad today, but not visit your restaurant for several days or weeks.
Multiple Touchpoints:
A customer might encounter many of your online marketing efforts, like PPC, social media, or organic search, before making a decision.
Average Order Value Variability:
The value of a conversion can vary significantly(a solo dinner vs a big-fat party, a quick lunch vs a full dinner).
Despite these challenges, it is possible to implement effective ROI tracking strategies. All you require is a combination of digital analytics, smart tracking tools, and a systematic approach to connecting online actions to offline outcomes.
How to Track the ROI of Your Restaurant’s PPC Effectively?
Here are some important ways through which you can accurately track the ROI of your restaurant’s PPC campaigns:
Define Your Key Performance Indicators and Conversion Goals
Before even launching a PPC campaign, you need to clearly define what would make your restaurant successful. Some notable conversion goals include:
- Online Reservations/Bookings: It is the most straightforward conversion you need to track.
- Phone Calls: You need to track phone calls, especially if your restaurant heavily relies on phone bookings.
- Online Food Orders(Delivery/Pickup): Tracking your online food order is essential, especially if your restaurant relies on an online ordering system.
- Website Visits: Make sure to track your organic traffic on pages with high intent, such as “menu,” “reservations,” “locations,” and “contact us” pages.
- Direction Requests: Clicks on the “Get Directions” feature in Google Maps.
- Newsletter Sign-ups: Building an email list for future marketing.
- Walk-ins: This is the trickiest aspect that requires more advanced strategies.
You need to assign a monetary value to each conversion where possible. For instance, if your table booking is worth $1 in revenue, you can assign that value to each online reservation. For less direct conversions like website visits, you may estimate a lower, incremental value.
Implement Robust Digital Tracking:
Digital monitoring is the technical backbone of your ROI tracking. For that, you need essential tools like Google Analytics 4, Google Tag Manager, Facebook Pixel(for social media PPC), etc.
Furthermore, you need to implement UTM parameters in all your ad URLs to clearly recognize the source, medium, campaign, and content of each click. This will help you segment your data in GA4 and understand which particular campaigns are performing well.
Attribute Offline Conversions:
This is the aspect where tracking the ROI of a restaurant becomes more nuanced. As many conversions happen offline, you need strategies that will help you connect the digital dots. Here’s how you can do so:
- Unique Offer Codes/Promotions: Run exclusive promotions in your PPC ads that customers must mention or present when they dine in. This offers a direct link between the ad and the offline conversion.
- “How Did You Hear About Us?” Surveys: You need to train your staff to ask customers how they found out about your restaurant. Although it may not be perfectly accurate, it will provide qualitative data and will help you identify trends.
- Reservation System Integration: If your online reservation system allows, you should try to integrate it with your analytics platforms to pass through referral information.
- Call Tracking Numbers: Use dynamic call tracking numbers in your PPC campaigns. When a customer calls a specific number, it can be attributed to the ad they saw. Services like CallRail offer advanced call tracking features, such as recording calls and integrating with CRM systems.
- Google My Business Insights: You need to monitor your Google My Business insights for actions like “Website Visits,” “Direction Requests,” and “Phone Calls.” Although these things don’t directly contribute to PPC, they can be influenced by your local PPC efforts.
- Foot Traffic Attribution(Advanced): If you are running a larger restaurant or a chain of restaurants, you can consider utilizing solutions that use Wi-Fi or beacon technology to track foot traffic that was exposed to your ads. This is a more complex and costly approach. Still, it offers highly accurate footfall attribution.
Calculate Your ROI:
Once you have your data ready, you need to do the calculation, which is straightforward:
ROI: (Revenue from PPC Conversions)/PPC Ad Spend
- Revenue from PPC Conversions: This is the total monetary value of all the conversions you have attributed to your PPC campaigns. This is where assigning a value to your conversions is essential.
- PPC Ad Spend: It is the total amount you spent on your PPC campaigns during a specific period.
Need Help Choosing the Right Agency? Check out our researched List of the Best Restaurant Marketing Companies.
To Summarize
Tracking the return on investment of your restaurant PPC campaigns has become an extremely fundamental requirement to ensure sustainable growth for your restaurant in this digital age.
By meticulously defining your goals, implementing robust tracking mechanisms, attributing offline conversions, and continuously analyzing your data, you can convert your PPC campaign into a profit-generating investment.
