Restaurant Facebook Ads: A step-by-step guide

 

Nowadays, Facebook advertising is considered a must for restaurants and hotels. If you are trying to market your restaurant, Facebook’s 2 billion daily active users are hard to ignore. But why are Facebook Ads necessary? Recent data shows that organic post performance is trending downward with organic reach averaging below 2% of followers, and engagement rates hovering at 0.15% for most industries. That’s where Facebook & Instagram Ads come in handy. They let you target people based on location, interests, and behaviors and they are considered as one of the cheapest and most effective types of online ads. Whether you’re a casual bar or a fine dining restaurant, Facebook can work wonders for restaurant advertising and can help you increase your sales.

The process might feel daunting if you’re new to social media advertising for restaurants but the good news is that you don’t need to be a marketing expert. Follow this beginner-friendly guide to learn how to set up your ad account, define your audience and create ads that sell.

 

Benefits of Facebook Ads for restaurants

Facebook Ads guarantee that you reach thousands of people at the right time. Here’s their most significant benefits:

• Massive Audience Reach: Facebook has billions of active users, making it one of the largest advertising platforms. You can reach potential customers worldwide across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and Audience Network.
• Highly Targeted Advertising: You can target users based on demographics, location, interests, behavior, and even their past interactions with your business. Lookalike Audiences allow you to reach people similar to your existing customers.
• Affordable & Trackable: Start at just $5 a day and see exactly who’s clicking or engaging with your ads.
• Retargeting & Remarketing: You can re-engage users who have previously visited your website, interacted with your content, or added products to their cart.
• Easy A/B Testing & Optimization: You can test different creatives, headlines, and audiences to find the best-performing ads.

 

Useful tip: You can use Meta Ad Library to spy on your competitors’ ads or get inspiration.

 

How Facebook Ads work

Facebook's advertising structure operates on three distinct levels: campaigns, ad sets, and ads. The campaign level is where you pick your main objective, like getting more website visits or raising awareness. Each objective yields very different results—awareness campaigns reach as many people as possible, while traffic campaigns focus on people more likely to click on your call-to-action. In the ad set level you set your budget, decide when the ad runs and choose your audience—you can focus on specific ages, places, or interests. Facebook lets you decide where your ad shows up—on Facebook, Instagram, or Messenger—and in what spots, like the feed, reels or stories. The ads level is where you add your graphics, captions, and the call-to-action. You only pay when people take action, such as clicking your ad or watching a certain number of views (usually 1,000). Facebook tracks all the users’ actions on your ads and shows you detailed statistics so you can tweak your ads and experiment to improve performance.

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How expensive are Facebook Ads?

On average, in 2025, restaurants pay around $0.42 per click (CPC) when someone clicks their ad, or about $2.60 for every 1,000 impressions (CPM). These numbers can shift based on things like the time of year—think busy holiday seasons when competition increases—or how specific the target audience is, like focusing on local foodies within a few miles of your location.

The good news? You don’t need a huge budget to get started. Restaurants can see results with as little as $1 a day, which could get you around 300-400 impressions (views) daily. A small budget like $25 to $125 a week is pretty common and can work well if you’re smart about targeting—say, aiming ads at people nearby who love dining out. To keep costs down, focus on eye-catching visuals of your best dishes and test different ads to see what clicks with your audience.

 

Facebook Ads vs Boosted Posts

There are 2 ways to create Facebook ads for your restaurant. A boosted post is when you take something you’ve already shared on your restaurant’s Facebook or Instagram page and pay to show it to more people. It’s quick, easy and can be done directly from the app but there are significant limitations in goal-setting and audience-targeting. On the other hand, Facebook Ads, created through the Facebook Ads Manager, give you way more tools: you can design ads from scratch, target super-specific groups (like “parents who like Italian food within 5 miles”), choose between many different goals, and track results in detail.

 

Useful tip: If you are looking for content inspiration, check our guide of the best ads for restaurants.

Different types of ads

Facebook offers a variety of ad formats to help businesses reach their target audience effectively. Here are the main types:

• Image Ads: Simple and effective, these ads feature a single image with a caption, making them ideal for brand awareness.
• Video Ads: Engage users with dynamic content; they can appear in the feed, reels or stories.
• Carousel Ads: Showcase multiple images or videos in a single ad, allowing users to swipe through different products or features.
• Lead Ads: Pre-filled forms that make it easy for users to submit their information for sign-ups, newsletters, or offers without leaving Facebook.
• Messenger Ads: Ads placed within the Messenger app, allowing businesses to engage users through direct messaging.

 

Setting up your Ad Account:

Before you create your first ad you must create a Facebook Ads Account and add your billing information. This guide from Facebook can walk you through the necessary steps.

You can start by going to business.facebook.com, click All Tools from the left sidebar and then click on Adverts Manager.

 

Step-by-step guide to create your first restaurant ad:

After setting up your account, head to the Campaigns section of the Facebook Ads Manager. From here you can create your first campaign by clicking the green button on the top left named Create.

 

In the window that pops up, you have to choose your campaign’s objective and click continue. Different objectives yield very different results since Facebook’s algorithm optimizes for the specific thing you are trying to achieve. For instance, Awareness campaigns typically get the most amount of views, Engagement campaigns are shown to people who are most likely to like or comment on your ad while Traffic campaigns are shown to people who are most likely to click on your call-to-action button. Traffic campaigns are ideal for restaurants that want to direct people to their website or app and together with Awareness ads are the most popular types used by restaurants.

For the Buying type on top, this guide provides a good explanation of their differences but we suggest the Auction type as it provides more flexibility.

 

If you choose a Traffic campaign you will be prompted to choose a campaign setup between recommended settings or a manual traffic campaign. Selecting Recommended settings is the ideal choice for beginners because a Manual traffic campaign requires a bit more knowledge of the platform.

For the next step, you only have to name your Campaign and click Next.

 

Now you are at the Ad Set level and this is where you set up things like your budget, the dates that your ad will run and in which locations. In the Budget & schedule section, choose between a daily or a lifetime budget and add the amount that you wish to spend. Then, set a start and an end date. Facebook even allows you to show your ads only at specific times and days of the week in the Budget scheduling sub-section.

Below, you can find the Audience controls and Advantage+ audience sections where you can define your audience by choosing a specific city or country, ages and genders. You have the ability to refine your audience further by selecting users who engage with restaurant and dining-related content, based on the Facebook pages they follow or posts they interact with.

 

In the Placements section you can choose which platforms you want to show your ads (Facebook, Instagram, Messenger) and in which formats (e.g. Stories, Reels, Feed etc). If you run Facebook Ads for the first time it is better to leave this setting intact and at the end of the campaign assess where your ads performed the best. In the first few days, Facebook’s algorithm is in learning phase where it optimizes performance and then shows the ads in the placements that perform the best. It basically does all the optimization for you!

After setting all the details of your ads, click Next in the bottom right.

 

Finally, it is time to name and create your ad. The Ad Setup section allows you to choose whether you want to use an existing post from your pages or create an ad from scratch. Below that, in the Destination section, choose your call-to-action button from the list of options.

 

Finally, if you choose to create an ad from scratch, go to the Ad creative section and click Set up creative. Here you can add your caption and image. You can ignore all other settings and click next to finalize your ad.

 

After you have finished, do not forget to click the green Publish button in the bottom right. Note that it can take Facebook up to 24 hours to approve your ad. As soon as your ad is approved, your ads will enter the learning phase for a period of 7 days maximum.

 

Congratulations, you have created your first Facebook campaign!