Honest Burgers Google Ads Case Study

What we were up against

Honest Burgers is a British burger restaurant, born in Brixton in 2011 and now serving up its no-nonsense take on the burger across a network of sites. Their Paid Search presence was already strong on the face of it, pulling in plenty of impressions, but a lot of those impressions were broad and often irrelevant.

On an already tight budget, that meant a meaningful chunk of spend was being wasted on the wrong people, and that waste left no room to try anything new or branch out.

The structure was a big part of the problem. A modest budget was split across a separate campaign for each of their forty-odd locations, which spread the budget far too thin. Every campaign was starved, none could build momentum, and the account was effectively stuck doing what it had always done.

Our goal was to break out of that.

We wanted to scale brand awareness in a way that actually meant something, drive genuinely relevant clicks and impressions through to the site, and grow the Store Visit conversions we'd introduced early on, turning online activity into real footfall through restaurant doors.

How we tackled it

Going into our 2nd year on the account, we started by being honest about what was holding it back, and the answer was clear: the budget couldn't stretch across that many separate campaigns.

So rather than increasing budget, we made the budget work harder.

We consolidated location campaigns into just two, one covering every restaurant in London and one covering everything outside it. Instead of a tight budget fragmented into forty locations, we had two well-funded campaigns with enough behind them to build momentum and reach a far greater volume of people, while focusing spend on relevant traffic rather than the broad, wasteful impressions of before.

The efficiency we freed up space to test and experiment with new campaign types. We trialled Demand Gen, which proved its worth quickly, driving both clicks to the site and store visit conversions, and opening up a new way to grow awareness rather than simply repeating what was already there.

What we achieved

The restructure delivered more traffic, more relevant traffic, and more of it converting into real-world visits, all while the cost of buying it fell.

•Clicks up 87% year on year, with non-brand clicks up 81%, a sign the growth came from reaching genuinely new audiences rather than just people already searching for the brand
•Overall conversions up 45%, including a 45% rise in Store Visit conversions, turning that awareness into footfall
•Cost per click down 32%, so all of that extra, more relevant traffic was bought more cheaply than before
•Additional revenue generated through web purchases on top

Beyond the numbers, the way of working has changed too. The relationship has grown to the point where we feel less like an external agency and more like an integral part of Honest Burgers' own marketing team.