Facebook Ad Thursday’s on Reservations. Today, we Breakdown FB Ads from Local Restaurants in Santa Monica. How are they doing and what could be done to improve the ads we see. It’s meant to be used as a case study to help others do a better job to increase their ROI on FB. Join us at 11:05 am PST Thursday.
Lets Breakdown FB Ads!
Jeff: Its time of the week again, it’s Facebook Ad Thursday and going to breakdown FB Ads. I am Jeff Harrison and Andrew McCauley.
Jeff : So what kind of reservations? This is kind of the fun part of the weekends. It’s never meant to be a negative because it’s meant to be a positive. But before we get going to breakdown FB Ads, Andrew found something that was very challenging today as he went to a very popular city.
Andrew: I went to Santa Monica, last week for teaching and I was looking around at all the cool and nice restaurants in Santa Monica. So I’ll get to check out and see which restaurants in Santa Monica are running Facebook Ads and I gotta tell you once again, I had trouble finding anyone running ads on Facebook from Sta. Monica. I would easily have said that I went through 30 different Facebook pages for restaurants and found nothing and fortunately the ones that did find were interesting at best.
Jeff: You know that. The interesting part about this, Andrew, is we’re going to see, and I know it’s not going to be that far in the future, maybe six months, 12 months, 18 months, where people are going to say, “God, I wish I’d have advertised on Facebook when they were only $5 leads”, and now they’re $80 because as these major manufacturers and major players jump on that, what’s going to happen is that they are going to drive it up because there’s not going to be any spots left. So let’s let’s jump in the boat and breakdown FB Ads.
Santa Monica Restaurant’s Breakdown FB Ads
Breakdown FB Ads: Tacos Super Gallito
Andrew: We’re going to jump into that first a little Ad from Tacos Super Galito. They have 25,000 followers on that page which is awesome and I think part of the reason why is because they’re following their followers. They have an Ad through a 15 second video, it has no talking and also without any sounds. Its just a set of pictures of their food, their truck and so on. “Great Mexican food for occasion, we do catering” and that’s it. The call to action, Jeff, which is one of those i am not a big fan of, “like our page”.
Andrew: Therefore, these guys are spending money on people liking their page, which ultimately these days, doesn’t bring money in the door. So they have 25,000 followers, which is good. I’d love to be able to see that these people are really their target market. I’m gonna highly guess that they’re not doing anything like that and they’re not running any other ads because it’s not popping up here in the information. They’re not running any other ads to people who liked their page either. So, Tacos Super Galito, good luck on you for running ads. Hopefully you’ve learned a little bit about this and say, “well, how else can we do this better?”, because, this is really throwing money away.
Jeff: That vanity metric. The liking of the page. There’s no way to collect people’s names and email addresses. There’s nothing, you know, because they’re a food truck.
Andrew: They are really not. I thought its a food truck Ad at first and then I realized that it’s a restaurant as well. They could do two things because they got a restaurant where people come in and they also got catering. It would be great splitting your ads and running ads to two different types of target or people and because you’re in Santa Monica there are lots of of offices and people working out there.
Points To Remember
Andrew: Do a different ad, don’t put a truck in there. Who would not want to go out and eat good Mexican food? However, for me, I don’t want to eat from a truck especially if in the first place I’m intending to go to a restaurant. Its not because your food is bad. I’m deciding based on my mentality that I want to go to a restaurant to sit down not on plastic seats and in front of a truck.
Jeff: It would be interesting to find out, why are they even running this ad. Is it just, “hey we just want to be in front of people”. I see nothing where it tells me to go further. There’s no address. There’s no phone number. It just says there’s 24,475 followers and likes.
Andrew: If you did click on the homepage the address is over there, just on the right side and stuff like that. But still it’s a couple of steps. So think about it. The Ad’s going to appear in front of somebody. You’re asking them to like the page. If they want to know the address of that joint, they have to go and find it. The most important is you are making them work and its not a good move.
Breakdown FB Ads: Native Santa Monica
Andrew: This one here is called Native Santa Monica and it has a few ads running and they are very, very image driven focus. What I do like about this restaurant is they’ve got the “book now” buttons. They’ve got some great imagery. The “book now” button goes to the website and it takes them straight to the reservation page. It’s really good. A stronger call to action on the ads would have been better. It’s like telling them what do you want them to do.
Andrew: Overall they’re doing the right thing. They are directing every visitor to a very visually stimulating website. If you click on the book now button, pop up comes along with time and dates and how many people you actually want to book in and that kind of simplicity is great. I liked the user experience on this one. I approved on these guys for doing that. As I said, the only improvement they could do is give a bit more of a call to action. I think they’ve got about six or seven Ads running. I’m not sure who they’re targeting in this case, but I’ve given it a good score.
The Odds
Jeff: One thing I would look at here now, they may just be doing some testing here, but if you look at their content as far as they have written copy of “an expression of love through food by that particular person” and it might be their chef. But it says the same thing on every one of them, they did not put on what is it exactly in the image. Is that a desert? Is that a beverage?
Andrew: But it looks great. If I wanted to order that, I don’t know what it’s called and I’m just gonna tell that I want that food in the ad.
Jeff: Yeah, I mean I like that “the food that hugs and heals the soul, local food check our amazing community, our offers, our community, our offers”. However, when I’m looking at this I’m wondering if they’re running a series of test ads like using the new Facebook thing that splits up because they have a lot of ads and it looks like almost everything is identical with the exception of the image. Its all about running a test. But that’s pretty good. Really good.
Breakdown FB Ads: Sushi Roku
Andrew: This one here is Sushi Roku. They’re running an Ad and this is an Instagram Ad now. So we’re looking at Instagram and so you can see ” visit the instagram profile button” down the bottom. Here, they are showing this exquisite beachfront Sushi and Japanese cuisine. The only place we can put a URL or a clickable link in Instagram is in the bio where we are right now. If you click on that IG delivery, what we find is actually a chain of hotels or a restaurant group and if you scroll down just a little bit down the bottom, you’ve got order online so you’re not really booking, you’re ordering online and you’ve got four different restaurants to choose from.
Jeff: Personally, I’d be saying, let’s run these restaurants separately, so not running the same Instagram. Remember we found this through Sushi, Roku. We found this through there. Now, all of a sudden you’re taking us to a confusing spot. I’m not sure if I’m at Root Roku, Sushi, Roku, or Katana and any of the others. You might want to make sure that you’re telling people the stories continuing from what they saw at the end of the first place.
Relevant Notes
Jeff: So, would you take it further as I’m going through here, Andrew? As an example, if that’s the Pasadena place, would I click to here and would I then put that in the URL?
Andrew: Pasadena dug under that to people everywhere. Everyone had people in Pasadena, a target. Those people must have put the Pasadena link to book a time for the Pasadena location for people in Pasadena.
Jeff: Yeah. I think here’s the big takeaway from this gang is narrow the focus. Don’t make it so broad. So, when visitors go to a landing page or a website or a booking page there’s too many distractions and you’re gonna, make it hard. Let’s face it. Somebody else is going to make it easy like the one we just saw and take a right to a booking page and it goes, it’s clean. This is confusing in my opinion.
Andrew: It is a really great, great Instagram page. Lovely pictures, lovely imagery, we’re not going to talk about it Instagram now, but they’ve got 6,663 followers. Some of these post should be getting a lot more likes than that.
Breakdown FB Ads: The Gables
Andrew: The final one and that is The Gables Santa Monica. Its a nice looking restaurant. Once again, we’re going to Instagram. Click on the visit Instagram. However, before we do that, the “buckwheat baby cake topped with housemade granola plus coconut cream. Dig in “. So it looks good. Nice imagery.
Jeff: It’s not nice imagery. Well, I think most people would know because I’m seeing hands in the image. I don’t really get to see the Buckwheat baby cake.
Andrew: I was joking. So here’s the thing about these images, by the way, people thought it’s beautiful images and you had. This may be a shot that’s portrait and it looks good in portrait. However, when Facebook crops it and cuts it, all of a sudden you’re looking at the wrong part of the picture. So make sure you check the pictures because you want to see and show a good picture of this house made granola, coconut. You don’t want to see hand model coming into it.
Andrew: Yes, but when you click on his Instagram profile you’ll see that once again, it takes us to the bio where they have a link, “Homestyle California Cuisine located in the heart of Santa Monica”. There’s no real call to action there, but once again as we click on the website, the website opens up. It’s a homepage and again, it’s one of those things where you get people caught up to find out more about your business, but they’re not going to take action because that’s what they’re doing there.
Jeff: You can look at the menus and find out more about it.
Andrew: It was nice looking website. Don’t get me wrong, I like it. It’s very, very beautiful, but remember you’re running ads, you’re trying to book a table on a 70 reservations page.
Jeff: It looks like a fun place.
Andrew: It looks like a fun place for sure.
Little Reminders on Using FB Ads
Andrew: We want to remind you we’re not knocking any of these places. Were just trying to help. Say this image we’re talking about. Exactly what I said. I didn’t realize I was guessing that’s the case, but there it is now. It looks good like that, but when Facebook started cropping it and by the way you can get back in your ad and crop it so that actually you do have the middle part or the part you’re looking for, so they should just go back and crop it. So we we’re seeing something that’s relevant.
Jeff: I liked it. I like everything about this except that the one takeaway that I get from the center of my little input is this, all these people who were running the Facebook ads, they’re doing it such a way that it’s almost giving Facebook Ads a bad name because I bet you, if we call any of those, say let me ask you something, “Can you give me your ROI on those ads?” How are they going to do that?
Andrew: I have no idea. So let’s go for it today, breakdown FB Ads and a couple of Instagram ones, which we have a looked at before. Hopefully that is good for you guys. Get some good ideas. If you’ve got any ads, you’re running a restaurant and you’re running your own ads, send us the link, we’ll happily dig through them and give you some feedback on it.
Jeff: I think we should get a hold of Sushi Roku, because they have like all kinds of locations. We can probably help them. All right guys, thank you for joining us here at Facebook Ad Thursday’s on Reservations : Breakdown FB Ads. Make sure to join us tomorrow for Q and A Friday. We’ve got a really good question.
Andrew: Yes. It’s related to today’s topic.
Jeff: All right, let’s see you tomorrow. We are working our way out of this one. Have a great week.
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