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Restaurants and cafés need different campaigns
Diners make a short trip, decide on a phone, and book or turn up within days. That’s the same for both. What differs is whether Meta can see the result.
| Restaurant | Café | |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | Bookings on quiet sessions | Foot traffic |
| Campaign | Sales or Leads, by what your booking system can send Meta | Awareness, “Maximise reach of ads”, with a frequency cap |
| Starting radius (inner city / suburbs / regional) | Casual 5 / 8 / 15 km. Fine dining 10 / 20 / 40 km | 2 / 3 / 5 km |
| How you measure | Covers on the offer in your booking records | A code word, and same-weekday takings |
The offer does most of the work
“Great food, great vibes, come and see us” gives Meta’s AI nothing to sell and guests no reason to act this week. One clear offer, run in every ad, gives them a reason and gives you a result you can count.
- Count what they get. A price beside one plate can look expensive. “Five dishes for $45” looks like a deal.
- Show the quantity. If the offer is four drinks, the photo shows four drinks.
- Say when. The day, the sitting or the dates.
Offers that suit restaurants and cafés:
- A set price for a set menu on your quietest session.
- A banquet or “feed me” price per head. It does the group organiser’s job for them.
- Bottomless food for a set time: steak, pasta, wings.
- A weekday express lunch for nearby offices.
- For cafés, breakfast and coffee before 9am, or the first week of a seasonal menu.
- Occasions and gift vouchers, promoted weeks before Valentine’s, Mother’s Day and Christmas book out.
Skip discounts off the whole menu. You can’t photograph them, and they teach people to wait. Selling gift vouchers or takeaway through your own online store? Check what each order keeps after costs with the break-even ROAS calculator before you advertise it.
Restaurants: get the booking back to Meta
Guests book in a pop-up or on your booking system’s own site. Unless that system sends a completed booking back to Meta, Meta can’t tell a booker from a browser, so it learns from clicks and finds more clickers.
Use the best signal your system can send, from this ladder: completed booking, then booking click, then enquiry or message, then landing page view. Choose the highest rung that gets at least 10 results a week at your budget. Meta’s standard event for a table booking is Schedule, which is offered under the Leads objective with your website as the conversion location.
No tracking history yet? Starting on Traffic, optimised for landing page views, is a legitimate first rung. Meta recommends landing page views over link clicks for traffic quality. Judge it by bookings in your own system, and move up the ladder once booking events flow.
Two checks before every launch:
- Link each ad to its offer, or to a booking link that opens on the offer’s day. Never your homepage.
- Make a booking on your phone, up to the last step before you confirm. You’ll see what guests see without sending Meta a fake booking.
One of our own venues advertised an offer its booking system wouldn’t take. In 21 days, A$670 of ads brought 4 offer bookings. After the repair, the same spend brought 21. A jump like that comes from fixing a fault, not from better ads.
Cafés: pay for reach, on purpose
Most café guests walk in. There’s no booking for Meta to optimise for, so reach is the honest goal.
- Objective: Awareness, with “Maximise reach of ads” and a frequency cap.
- Radius: drop a pin on your address, not your suburb name. Meta allows 1 to 80 km. Remove the default country or city after you add the pin.
- Timing: schedule ads in the hours before and during opening. Each time slot must be at least an hour. If the option doesn’t appear, switch to a lifetime budget.
- Creative: what’s on today, and where you are. A fresh phone photo of this week’s special counts.
- Measure what Meta can’t see: a code word (“mention this ad for…”), and same-weekday takings in your POS against your baseline.
Don’t switch to optimising for clicks to “fix” a reach campaign. With no booking to track, reach is the right tool.
Audiences: keep your regulars
- Exclude recent bookers, not every past guest. Regulars are your best customers.
- Build custom audiences now: guests who agreed to marketing, from your booking system; website visitors from the last 180 days; Instagram engagers from the last 365 days.
- Several venues? One ad set with a pin on each, unless each venue’s budget can feed its own.
Your 30 minutes a week
Do it the morning after your busiest stretch, for most venues Monday or Tuesday. Check covers on the offer against your target cost per cover. Switch off ads past your stop rule. Add new ads every second week. And move money to the night that needs it: when a night fills, switch off its ads and put the budget behind the next quiet session, with new ads rather than edited ones.
Rules your ads must follow
- Advertised prices are the total. Weekend and public holiday surcharges go on the menu, as prominently as your highest price.
- No card surcharges on eftpos, Mastercard, Visa or American Express since 1 October 2026. Take them off menus, ads and booking pages.
- Alcohol in the ad means 18+, the industry’s alcohol code (ABAC) and your state’s liquor promotion rules.
- Photos show the dish as it’s served. “Award-winning” only if it’s current and provable.
This is general information, not legal advice. Your plan for restaurants and cafés covers the rules in full, with your radius, offer and 90 days of Australian dining dates. Or start with the free 3-minute quiz.