Is Google Ads worth it for a Manchester restaurant?

Where it pays: searches with a booking in them

• Christmas party venues, from September onward, where offices across Spinningfields and Salford Quays book for dozens at a time and the person searching is organising, not browsing.
• Bottomless brunch, afternoon tea, Sunday roast and set menus, where the search names the occasion and the booking follows within minutes.
• Private dining and function rooms, where one booking can be worth a quiet Tuesday's takings.
• Pre-theatre and pre-show tables near the Palace, the Opera House and the AO Arena, where the search happens on a phone within an hour of the door opening.
• Hen and birthday groups, which search weeks ahead and compare three or four venues before anyone calls.

Where it does not: the walk-in trade

A place with a queue outside on a Saturday does not need to buy the customers already in it. Searches for a generic lunch or dinner near the Northern Quarter or Ancoats are answered by the map results and the review count, and paying per click to appear above them for someone who will walk into whichever door is nearest is money spent on a decision that was already made. The Google Business Profile does that job for nothing, and the hours, the menu link and the photos on it matter more than any ad.

Radius, hours and the weeks that matter

Restaurant campaigns are the tightest targeting we run. A radius of a mile or two for the same-day searches, a wider one for the occasions people travel for, and an ad schedule that follows the kitchen rather than the office day. Then the calendar: home matchdays at Old Trafford and the Etihad, the Christmas Markets from early November, Freshers' fortnight for anywhere near Oxford Road and Fallowfield, Pride weekend around the Village. Budgets should move with those weeks; a campaign left on one daily budget all year is capped by mid-afternoon on the days it should be running.

The booking-engine problem

Most Manchester restaurants take bookings through a third-party widget or a separate booking site, and Google Ads cannot see a booking that happens inside someone else's page unless it is wired to. Before a penny is spent, the booking confirmation has to fire a conversion the account can read, or every report is a guess. Phone bookings need a call conversion with a minimum duration, so a thirty-second call asking about parking does not count as a table.

When the free channels do it

If the bookings arrive from the map results and the reviews, and the diary is full on the nights you care about, the honest advice is to keep the money. Google Ads earns its place when there is a specific occasion to sell, a quiet night to fill, or a new opening nobody has heard of yet. Run it for those, measure the bookings it produced against what it cost, and switch it off in the weeks it is not needed.

Where this leads

The service this question belongs to is Ads for bookings and appointments, and the longer read is our guide Measuring calls and bookings from Google Ads.