By Supaorder Team — who we are
Restaurant Digital Advertising: What to Run
Which paid channels are worth a restaurant's money, what each one is actually good at, and the three ways restaurants waste an advertising budget.
Restaurant digital advertising is worth doing for exactly one job: reaching people who have never ordered from you. Everything else — bringing regulars back, recovering a lapsed customer, promoting a new dish to people who already like your food — is cheaper and more reliable through the channel you own.
That single distinction decides most of the budget questions below, so it is worth settling before looking at any channel.
The four channels, and what each is genuinely good at
Local search — the highest-return thing most restaurants are not doing properly. Someone typing “thai food near me” at 6pm has intent no social platform can manufacture. A complete Google Business Profile with current hours, real photographs of real plates, and a direct ordering link is free, and it outperforms paid channels for most independent restaurants. Paid local search sits on top of that and is worth it in dense markets where the free listing is buried.
Paid social — good at a specific thing, bad at most others. It is a discovery channel, not an intent channel: nobody on Instagram was looking for dinner. It works for a genuinely new thing — an opening, a new site, a menu people cannot get elsewhere — and it works badly as a standing “order from us” campaign, because you are paying to interrupt people who were not hungry.
Marketplace promotions — the most expensive customer you will ever buy. Boosting your listing inside a delivery marketplace costs the promotion plus the commission on every resulting order, and the customer it produces belongs to the marketplace. There is one situation where this is still correct, and it is covered below.
Retargeting — the one with the best arithmetic and the smallest ceiling. Showing an ad to someone who visited your ordering page and did not finish converts far better than cold reach, for obvious reasons. It is limited by how many people visit in the first place, which is why it is a multiplier on the other channels rather than a channel.
The number that decides everything
Work out what a customer is worth to you before you spend anything on acquiring one.
Take your average order value, multiply by your gross margin, and multiply again by how many times a typical customer orders in a year. A £25 order at 65% margin ordering eight times is roughly £130 of gross profit a year.
That number is your ceiling. If a channel costs more than a fraction of it to acquire a customer, it does not work — and the fraction should be small, because not every acquired customer becomes a repeat one.
Most restaurants have never calculated this and are therefore unable to tell a good channel from a bad one. It is the single most useful hour of work in this whole subject, and it needs no software.
Three ways restaurants waste the budget
Advertising to people who already order from you. Broad social targeting reaches your regulars, who would have ordered anyway. You pay for a sale you already had, and it shows up as a return on ad spend that looks fine and is not. Exclude your customer list from cold campaigns — this is one setting and almost nobody sets it.
Paying twice for the same order. Running a marketplace promotion and a paid social campaign that sends people to the marketplace means the commission and the ad spend land on the same order. If you are advertising, send the traffic to your own ordering page.
Advertising a broken experience. If the ordering page is slow, the menu photographs badly, or the delivery estimate is optimistic, advertising buys you a larger number of people discovering that. Fix the conversion problem first — it is cheaper than the traffic.
When the marketplace promotion is still right
Two situations, and it is worth being specific because the blanket advice on both sides is wrong.
A brand new site with no local awareness. You need a first hundred customers and you do not yet have a list, a following, or a search presence. The marketplace has all three. Buy the discovery, accept the commission as an acquisition cost, and have a plan for moving those customers to your own channel afterwards — a card in the bag, a first-order discount on your own app, something.
A genuinely dead period you cannot fill any other way. A Tuesday in February is not going to be rescued by your email list, because your list already knows you exist and has decided not to come.
Outside those, a marketplace promotion is renting customers you are then charged for again on every subsequent order.
What “good” looks like
Measure acquisitions, not impressions. Reach, engagement and video views are not the thing. New customers, and what they cost, is the thing.
Give a channel long enough to be judged and no longer. Two weeks is a guess; a quarter is an answer. Restaurants routinely kill a channel at week three and start another, which converts an advertising budget into a series of learning experiences.
Track the second order. A channel producing customers who never come back is producing transactions, not customers, and the two have very different values. This is where an owned customer list stops being a marketing nicety and becomes the only way to know whether the advertising worked at all.
Where to start if you are starting
Fix the free thing first: a complete, current Google Business Profile with a direct link to your own ordering page. Then calculate what a customer is worth to you. Then, and only then, pick one paid channel and run it for a quarter with your existing customers excluded.
The economics underneath all of this — what an order costs you through a marketplace versus direct — are worked through in what a marketplace order really costs, and when direct ordering pays for itself is the same question as a break-even.