Your ad platforms report one number. Your POS reports another. Most restaurant agencies send you the first one.
Graystone runs Google and Meta ads for restaurant groups with 5 to 50 locations, and every report ties back to what your locations actually booked. If the platform and the POS disagree, we trust the POS.
Get the free Ad Spend Reconciliation Check
Why restaurant ad accounts drift from the books
Restaurant accounts are among the easiest to over-report. Three causes show up again and again.
- Modeled store visits. Google and Meta count estimated in-store visits as conversions. They are estimates. Your POS does not book estimates.
- Mislabeled orders. A server-side tag that marks ordinary orders as catering makes the catering campaign look like your best campaign. We found exactly this in our own server tags on a restaurant account, retired the inflated figure and rebuilt the view on booked orders.
- Location sprawl. Years of agencies leave hundreds of paused campaigns and competing naming conventions. Nobody can see which locations earn their budget.
None of this is fraud. The platform will always say it is working. That is what platforms are designed to say.
What we run
- Google Ads. Search, Performance Max and local campaigns structured by location, so each unit has its own spend and its own number.
- Meta Ads. Prospecting and retargeting by trade area, with catering and large-order campaigns kept separate from dine-in and online ordering.
- Brand vs non-brand split. Brand search is the most flattering line in your account and the least incremental. We report it separately.
- A weekly scoreboard. Spend, platform-reported results and POS-booked revenue on one page, by location.
- LinkedIn, Reddit and TikTok are available when they fit the plan. For most restaurant groups they do not.
How an engagement starts
- Free Ad Spend Reconciliation Check. About 30 minutes in your own accounts. We find the double count, find the stale property, and put the platform number next to the POS number. It is yours to keep whether or not we ever talk.
- Tracking build (add-on). GA4, Google Tag Manager and server-side Conversions API, wired to your POS or online ordering. With this add-on, measurement is live and reconciled in 30 days, or management is free until it is.
- Account rebuild. Read the full history, find the pattern that worked, archive the noise, and restructure by location.
- Run and report. A dedicated media buyer with senior QA review. A working call every other week, or async updates.
We guarantee the mechanism, not the market. There is no ROAS, revenue or CPA guarantee, and you should be wary of any agency that offers one.
What this looked like for one restaurant brand
A multi-location restaurant brand came to us after cycling through several agencies. The account held hundreds of paused legacy campaigns and competing naming conventions, and nobody could say what was working.
We read the full multi-year Google and Meta history before changing anything. The same pattern kept winning: catering and value offers, optimized for purchase, focused by geography, with food-forward creative. Traffic and awareness plays kept losing. So we archived the legacy campaigns, rebuilt the account around that pattern, and gave it one naming system leadership can read by offering and market.
Then we fixed the measurement. Modeled in-store visits now sit apart from online purchases. When our own server-tag audit found general orders labeled as catering, we retired the catering figure and rebuilt the view on booked orders. Measured that way, catering sales grew. A new-location launch play, built one market at a time, became the template for every opening after it.
The client is not named here, and we do not publish their numbers. The restructure and the measurement fix are the result.
Read the full case study: From hundreds of legacy campaigns to a focused set of winners. Related: the restaurant group RevOps and CRM case study.
Pricing
Management is a monthly fee scoped to your ad spend, number of locations and what you need built. Ad spend is billed separately, and creative production stays with your team. Tracking, email and SMS, and CRO and landing pages are available as add-ons.
The fastest way to a number is a short conversation about your accounts.
Who this fits
- Restaurant groups and hospitality brands with 5 to 50 locations doing $5M to $50M.
- A POS or ordering system that reports by location.
- One internal owner who can give access and make decisions.
- A CEO or CFO who has said the agency's number does not match the books.
It does not fit groups under 5 locations, franchise systems without unit-level POS data, or cash-only operations. We would rather say so now.
Start with the number you already have
Send us read access and we will put your platform number next to your POS number. About 30 minutes, free, and yours to keep.