In October of 2021, after my internship with AHM Brands, I moved down to Santa Monica, California, where I got a job as a waiter and bartender at Fritto Misto, an Italian restaurant in downtown Santa Monica. Soon after I began working there, I began consulting with the management team about increasing our restaurant’s marketing efforts, which eventually led to me creating and managing a Google Ads Search campaign for our restaurant.
Using the skills I had developed in my internship at AHM Brands, I took full control of every aspect of our Google Ads campaign, which began with:
Agreeing with management on a starting budget
Creating various ad groups that strategically targeted specific consumer demographics
Creating extensive keyword and negative keyword lists that accompanied these ad groups
Determining match types for these keywords, and more
We didn’t have anyone else on our team that knew much about digital marketing or coding, so I also had to teach myself the ins and outs of Google Tag Manager to enable event tracking and conversion tracking for our campaign, which included phone calls, online orders, clicks to get directions to the restaurant, etc.
Over the next 6 or so months I diligently updated and refined our campaign. One of the things I noticed was our “Landing Page Experience” statistic was dragging down our Ad Quality Score. This led me to undertaking the project of reconstructing our website to make it simple, easy to navigate, and optimized for quick and easy conversions. Throughout this process, I learned a lot about the backend of Wordpress and the challenges of redesigning a website.
Today, the search campaign for Fritto Misto is still running and is highly efficient. We are consistently at around a 7% clickthrough rate and an industry-leading $0.67 average cost-per-click. Since beginning the campaign, we have increased the budget from $15 per day to about $25 per day, and we are almost certainly generating profit for the restaurant that greatly exceeds the $25 being spent per day. Pictured are some statistics from the month of August, in the form of a report that I presented to my management team.
