Thinking of running some Facebook Ads campaigns to generate more bookings for your restaurant? This post will walk you through some campaign ideas I ran recently for a local restaurant.
Firstly, the restaurant I ran these campaigns for is of a high standard. Located in a wine region in Victoria it’s won numerous “Chef’s Hats” so it’s not your local pizza shop. They serve incredible food with a wine list to match, which means they charge accordingly. Attracting a new booking via a cost affective marketing channel has serious up-side for these guys.
In this example, I have actually used a related Facebook Page of my own and paid for the ads myself. I don’t share client data, so to create this post, I set a budget of $100. I hope the venue appreciated the free advertising!
On to the tips…
1. Life Events Targeting
When do people head out to a classy, expensive restaurant? Special occasions of course. And one of the the most special “Life Events” is a wedding anniversary… unless you forget, in which case it’s not a very pleasant time at all…
Facebook Ads gives you the ability to target people who are approaching a wedding anniversary, so long as they have updated their wedding status.
As you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve targeted people within 15 miles of the restaurant, who have an anniversary within 30 days. This gives me a total target audience of 1,300 people. Pretty targeted and a fairly small audience.
If you were in a city this would obviously be significantly higher; changing the location to Melbourne (City), for example, the reach increased to 20,000 people. You could then try adding in different interests based on people’s interest in certain cuisine.
2. Combining Facebook Audience Target Types
The next audience I tested in my campaign was a combination of Location, Age (35-65), Relationship Status and an interest in “Luxury Goods”. As you can see below, this created a similar size target to my Life Events campaign.
Once again, this is a pretty small audience due to the population of the area surrounding the restaurant I was promoting. Change this to a major city and your Target audience will increase significantly.
3. Try Carousel Ads
I’ve found that the carousel ad format, in general, seems to generate better engagement than static image ads – but always test for yourself. The beauty with this format is that you can tell a story about your product(s) or service. And in the case of a hospitality business, show off your beautiful food and venue.
You could try pointing to different menus with your carousel ads; Breakfast/Lunch/Dinner for example. Or you could point out various features of the venue, such as the Restaurant, Wine Tasting and Accommodation. Carousel ads let you have up to 5 “cards” so you have plenty to experiment with. In this example I’ve focused on specific features of the restaurant.
4. Test Facebook Lead Ads
If your venue runs events, such as weddings or parties, then you Facebook lead ads are well worth trying for generating enquiries.
The Results
I ran two AdSets with the 2 targets outlined above side by side of 7 days. The results were as follows:
As you can see above, the Luxury Goods campaign performed best based on click through rates and cost per click. What we don’t know, however, is which campaign converted better. Given I had no access to conversion tracking, we’ll  never know which campaign converted best to leads.
What Next?
You could test other target audiences to see how they respond to the ads, or you could dig a little deeper into your results and see how certain age ranges and genders have responded.
As you can see, the ladies seem to quite like the notion of dining at this particular venue. Women aged 35 to 64 appear to be the sweet spot for this campaign, eliciting the most clicks at reasonable cost per click prices. I’d be inclined to duplicate this AdSet and specifically target this audience.
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