It is no secret that the restaurant industry generates quite a few search queries, so online marketing is extremely important. If you want people to find your restaurant website, there are three types of online marketing you need employ—SEO, PPC, and social media marketing. When it comes to SEO and social media, it’s all about generating backlinks and engaging your audience. The downfall to these types of marketing is the idea that you have to wait a while for results. Results are never steady, so it’s tough to analyze them and try to improve. PPC, on the other hand, is a different story.
PPC, or pay per click advertising, is a way to level the playing field between companies. As long as you bid and can pay for your ad to show up for a certain keyword (which could be part of a variety of search queries), your company website will show up at the top of a Google search engine results page (SERP). This makes keyword research and Google AdWords auction strategy very important. However, there is one aspect of PPC in the restaurant industry that often seems to get ignored: The size of the business.
How to Determine the Size of Your Restaurant for PPC
The truth is, the size of your restaurant should greatly affect your PPC campaign strategy. Oftentimes restaurants put too much emphasis on certain aspects of PPC bidding and ignore the fact that their company might be too small to really thrive with that type of bidding.
Before delving into PPC aspects that change based on size, it’s important to understand where your company falls in terms of size. The easiest way to do this is not be considering the number of employees in your restaurant, but considering the amount of money you spend on PPC advertising (although both usually coincide). Below are three different sizes according to Search Engine Land’s Brad Geddes:
- Small: Up to $10,000. There are slightly different strategies used for companies between $500 and $1,000, $1,000 to $5,000, and $5,000 and above, but for the most post these are all considered small accounts.
- Mid–Sized: $10,000 to $100,000. Once again this can be broken up into section, but generally these different accounts can use the same strategy.
- Large: $100,000 to $1 million.
- Huge: $1 million to $3 million.
- Massive: Anything higher than $3 million.
There are always exceptions to the different sized PPC accounts and companies, but in general companies spend in accordance with their general size. This post will show you how PPC and the Restaurant Industry can become one!
PPC Aspects That Will Change Depending on the Size of Your Restaurant
Below are a few things that will change how a company goes about PPC based on the size of the restaurant:
- Campaign – A small company will only need to create one or two campaigns (usually one about search and for display ads). However, a larger company will want to plan what accounts they need before getting into bidding on different keywords. Depending on your size, determine how much planning you’ll need to do before you take a look at keywords.
- Keyword Research – Small and mid-sized restaurants will want to do a lot of research to make sure that they are getting the most for their money. Large business, however, can easily use external tools to complete keyword research because they have more money to spend.
- Match Type – There are a few different types of match types—broad match, modified broad match, phrase match, and exact match. You can visit here to learn more. In general, small to mid-sized restaurants utilize more broad-match whereas larger restaurants focus on a more exact match.
Have you found that your restaurant PPC ad campaigns differ from those of a different size? Let us know in the comments below how size affects your PPC strategy.
Photo Credit: suite101.com
Amanda DiSilvestro is a professional blogger that writes on a variety of topics including San Francisco restaurants. She writes for Restaurants.com, a leading directory of restaurant ratings.
