Thanksgiving catering advertising for a restaurant in Brooklyn (USA): $27,380 in sales on a $1,004 budget, ROMI 2627%

The task

A Caribbean restaurant in Downtown Brooklyn. A well-known place that guests love. Yet the restaurant received no private event inquiries at all.

What hurt:

• There was nowhere to leave an event inquiry. The website had no page for people who wanted to host a celebration at the restaurant. Demand was not lost along the way — it simply had nowhere to arrive.
• The restaurant was not collecting seasonal revenue. Before Thanksgiving families order turkey with sides to take home. A restaurant with a recognizable kitchen has every chance at those orders, but there was no take-out product and no way to buy it.
• Time was short. Holiday demand lives for a few weeks. Miss mid-November and you wait until next year.

The task was to close both gaps: give guests a way to leave an event inquiry, and sell holiday catering before the season ended.

What we did

• Built a private events page. A dedicated page on the website with an inquiry form. Before that, a person who wanted to celebrate at the restaurant had nowhere to write.
• Put together a mini store for one product. A small page on Wix with payment: a take-out holiday set with turkey. One product, one scenario — choose and pay. There is no point in building a full online store for an offer that lasts a few weeks.
• Launched Meta advertising with the Conversions API. Server-side event tracking is needed so that the algorithm learns from real completed orders, not from clicks.
• Showed the offer to people used to buying online. A separate ad set targeted engaged shoppers — an audience of people who regularly place orders on the internet. Two more ad sets ran in Stories.

Results

Thanksgiving catering:

• Ad budget — $1,004.
• Sales through the order page — $27,380.
• ROMI — 2,627%.

Sales began in mid-October and rose sharply two weeks before the holiday — to roughly $2,500 a day at the peak.

After launch the private events page brings about 100 inquiries a month. Before, there were none.

The Meta ad account for the campaign: total spend of $1,004.04. The second row is the ad set for engaged shoppers: an initiated checkout at $3.60.

Order page sales from October 15: $27,380 for the season, with the peak from November 8 to 20.

Insights

• A seasonal product does not need a big budget. $1,004 was enough, because the kitchen was already known and the buyer only had to choose and pay.
• A short path to payment. One product on one page: the person has nothing to choose between and nowhere to get lost.
• The engaged shoppers audience gave the cheapest demand. An initiated checkout there cost $3.60.
• No inquiries does not mean no demand. Here the demand existed; the form did not. The events page brought about 100 inquiries a month.