How To Promote Your Restaurant With Google AdWords (Part 1)

Before you start spending money for a high position in Google search, make sure you’ve covered the basics for the free listing. That would be setting up Google Places for your restaurant and optimizing your website for search engines. Also, since you’ll be paying for visits, it’s worth checking your sales funnel. Is your website covering most of the items in this list?

If the basics are done, keep on reading. This is a detailed guide on how to promote your restaurant with AdWords.

AdWords advertising for restaurants

With Google AdWords you create ads that can be displayed on Google search sites (in the search results pages) or on the Google Display Network (websites that your potential customers visit). In both cases, the underlying principle is that of an auction, bidding for a better ad position.

For a restaurant business with a rather limited budget, advertising on the search network is the best way to go. Your ads are displayed in the moment someone is actively searching for a place to eat. The display network is more helpful for building brand awareness. Your ad can be shown on a news website, for example. Your restaurant might get noticed, but the conversion... is more of a longer shot.

By default, the ads are displayed on all types of devices (desktop, tablets and mobile phones) and you should leave it like this. Recent studies cited by Constant Contact showed that restaurants are the most searched industry by consumers on mobile devices. 81% of consumers owning a smartphone have searched for a restaurant on a mobile device, while 75% of them said they often choose a restaurant to dine at based on these searches. That’s how advertising on the search network can be an important sales generator for your restaurant business. And since we were mentioning the sales funnel earlier, it is crucial that your restaurant website is mobile friendly and is able to offer a mobile optimized menu and ordering process.

One more thing before we move on to the the more complicated stuff: you can and you should carefully geo-target your AdWords campaigns. Obviously, there is limited distance a potential customer would be willing to cover to get to your restaurant and a limited area that you can successfully serve with delivery.

That being said, we’ll continue with keywords, creating ads and bidding strategies, topics that are at the core of AdWords advertising.