Google makes it easy to start spending and hard to spend well. None of the mistakes below are about intelligence. They come from setting a campaign up once, in a hurry, and never looking at it again.
1. Targeting the whole city
A restaurant in Thonglor that targets "Bangkok" pays for clicks from people across the city who will not cross it in traffic for dinner. The fix: target a radius around your venue that matches how far your guests really travel, and treat hotel areas and tourist zones as their own campaign with their own budget.
2. No negative keywords
Without them, your "Italian restaurant Sukhumvit" ad can show for "Italian restaurant jobs", "Italian recipe" or "cheap buffet". The fix: start with a list of words you never want to pay for (jobs, hiring, recipe, delivery if you are dine-in only, for sale) and read your Search Terms report every week for the first month. It shows exactly what people typed before they clicked.
3. Running the same bids around the clock
A dinner restaurant does not need to compete for clicks at 4am. The fix: set an ad schedule. Look at when people actually book with you, usually around lunchtime and late afternoon for dinner, and spend more then. Pause or reduce the dead hours. Your own "hour of day" data will tell you more than any rule of thumb.
4. Sending every click to the homepage
Someone searches "private dining room Sathorn", clicks your ad and lands on a homepage with a video, your story and a newsletter pop-up. They leave. The fix: one landing page per intent. The private dining ad goes to the private dining page, with photos, capacity, a sample menu and an enquiry button.
5. Not tracking bookings
If you cannot say how much a booking from Google Ads costs you, you are guessing. And Google's automatic bidding cannot optimise for bookings it never sees. The fix: track what matters: clicks on your booking link (tagged so you know they came from ads), completed online reservations where your booking tool allows it, WhatsApp and LINE clicks, and enquiry forms.
Google's call forwarding numbers and call reporting are not available in Thailand, so the usual "track calls from ads" advice does not work here. Use tagged booking links, a dedicated tracking number from a local provider, or click-to-chat tracking instead.
6. Ads that look like everyone else's
"Best Italian restaurant Bangkok, book now" sits next to three ads that say the same thing. The fix: say what only you can say. The chef's background, the dish people come back for, the view, the location two minutes from a BTS station, an award. Use every ad asset Google offers: location, sitelinks to your menu and private dining, and structured snippets.
7. Set it and forget it
Competitors change bids, seasons change demand, and a campaign that worked in high season can waste money in the rains. The fix: twenty minutes a week. Read search terms, cut what does not book, move budget to what does, test one new ad. If nobody on your team has those twenty minutes, that is a good reason to hand it over.
Quick self-check
- Our ads target where our guests come from, not the whole city.
- We have a negative keyword list and read search terms this month.
- Our ad schedule follows when people actually book.
- Each campaign lands on a page made for it.
- We know what one booking from ads costs us.
- Our ads say something a competitor could not.
- Someone looked at the account in the last two weeks.
Fewer than four ticks? Ask us for a free ads review. We will tell you what to fix first, whether or not you work with us. Or read how we run Google and Meta Ads for restaurants.