Paid

Chef Driven Hospitality

7x more booking actions from Google Ads

How we fixed the tracking and rebuilt Google Ads for 17 New York restaurants, turning spend nobody could measure into thousands of trackable booking actions.

Booking actions from Google Ads

-0%

Cost per booking action

+0%

Ad Click-through rate

Private event enquiries in four months

The Challenge

What we were up against

Chef Driven Hospitality is a New York restaurant group behind 17 distinct venues across Manhattan.

They range from French bistros like Le Monde and L'Express to Monterey Modern Steakhouse, the 5 Napkin Burger sites, Mediterranean favourites Acadia, Barbounia and Dagon, and Schmackary's cookie shop. Each restaurant ran its own Google Ads account, with its own audience, goals and budget.

The group came to us with one urgent problem: they couldn't see which bookings their ads were driving. In the months before we took over, Acadia, Monterey, Sempre Oggi and Barbounia had recorded zero conversions despite spending every month. Schmackary's counted conversions but passed no revenue, so its reported return on ad spend was unusable for budget decisions.

Without that signal, the campaigns were optimising for clicks, not diners. Every account ran 100% broad match with no negative keywords, so budget leaked to searches for other Manhattan restaurants and booking sites like "opentable nyc". With budgets of $200 to $1,800 a month per restaurant, there was no room for that kind of waste.

Our goal was clear: make bookings measurable, then use that signal to bring more diners through each restaurant's doors.

Our Approach

How we tackled it

We spent our first month on measurement, because nothing else works without it. Most of the group's reservations happen on OpenTable, and some restaurants take delivery orders through third-party sites. Neither can pass a completed booking back to Google Ads.

So we tracked the closest reliable signal instead: the moment someone clicks "Book now" or "Find a table". We added separate tracking for private event enquiries, online orders, calls and direction requests, and switched on revenue tracking for Schmackary's online shop. We kept refining it throughout, moving private event tracking from a confirmation message to a confirmation page for greater accuracy.

Then we rebuilt every account around its own restaurant. Using Chef Driven's brief for each venue, covering its location, audience, signature offers and local competitors, each campaign was built around what makes that place different:

•Monterey: BYOB weekends, its steakhouse positioning near Rockefeller Center, and the Big Sur event space for up to 400 guests
•L'Express: late-night dining, open until 2am and until 4am at weekends
•Nizza: $12 Pasta Tuesdays and gluten-free Italian

We replaced blanket broad match with themed ad groups, exact and phrase match keywords and robust negative keyword lists, adding broad match back selectively to find new search terms. We also moved spend away from brand searches, where diners would likely have found the restaurant anyway, towards people still deciding where to eat.

The Results

What we achieved

Comparing the four months before we took over (May to August 2025) with our last four months on the accounts (November 2025 to February 2026), the group got far more measurable bookings from a similar budget.

•Booking actions up 7x, from 632 to 4,466, on 17% more spend
•Cost per booking action down 83%, from $61.39 to $10.15
•Click-through rate up 43%, from 3.89% to 5.58%, on 26% fewer impressions: fewer wasted views and more of the right people clicking
•143 private event enquiries tracked in four months, a high-value lead the group could barely measure before
•3,452 requests for directions, 838 store visits and 333 calls from ads on top

Part of that jump comes from bookings becoming measurable for the first time. The restaurants that tracked the same reservation action before and after show the like-for-like gain:

•Napkin Burger - 74 reservations to 225 reservations.
•French Roast - 108 reservations to 163 reservations.
•Napkin Burger - 265 reservations to 323 reservations.

Schmackary's could finally see what its ads earned. Revenue tracking went live in December and recorded $2,157 in online sales from about $1,000 of spend over three months.

When Chef Driven brought Google Ads management in-house, we handed over a six-month 2026 roadmap for every restaurant, covering Performance Max and Google Maps, Demand Gen, customer match lists and competitor targeting, so the new team could build on the foundations from day one.

Booking actions count clicks to reserve, private event enquiries and online orders. They are booking-intent actions, not confirmed OpenTable reservations.

other work