From the experts at ECEP
Practical business strategies from the leaders of Elite Catering + Event Professionals
For more than 20 years, Catering by Michaels has invested in Google Ads. During that time, social media platforms have come and gone, digital marketing has become increasingly sophisticated, and the way consumers search for caterers has changed dramatically.
But Google Ads have remained an important part of the company’s marketing mix.
“The ROI from Google Ads has consistently been among the top performers across all of our marketing channels, which has kept us invested,” says Jeff Ware, chief operating officer of the Chicago catering firm.
In fact, as other forms of advertising became less effective, the company shifted more of its marketing dollars toward Google Ads. But the way it manages those dollars has changed considerably.
And Catering by Michaels isn’t alone. Other members of Elite Catering + Event Professionals (ECEP) are still investing in Google Ads, but their approaches reveal just how much the paid-search landscape is evolving. Some rely on agencies. Others are bringing more expertise in-house. And all are paying close attention to how AI may change the way customers search.
Know When to Bring in the Pros
Like many businesses, Catering by Michaels initially managed its Google Ads internally. That changed in 2015, when the company hired an outside agency to handle its paid media. Ware says the difference was significant.
“That same year we saw 21% growth in revenue,” he says. “I can’t prove one caused the other, but I do know you pretty much need a PhD in PPC [pay-per-click] to be effective, and the results from letting the pros handle it have been impressive.”
Stay on Top of Updates
Today, the agency manages virtually every detail of the company’s Google Ads program, from keyword selection and ad copy to imagery and campaign optimization.
That doesn’t mean the Catering by Michaels team is hands-off. Instead, they make sure the agency has all the information it needs. When the company adds a venue, refreshes menus or makes other changes that could affect how customers search for its services, the agency is brought up to speed.
Campaigns are reviewed and updated monthly. The agency provides detailed performance reports and recommendations, while advertising budgets are set approximately every six months, based on performance and opportunities.
For Ware, that division of responsibility has allowed his team to focus on running the business rather than trying to keep pace with an increasingly complex advertising platform.
The Benefits of Agency Coordination
Taylor Donato, senior marketing manager of M Culinary Concepts in Phoenix, Arizona, also sees value in an outside agency, but for an additional reason: Google Ads are no longer operating on their own.
M Culinary Concept’s agency coordinates Google Ads with other paid channels, including Meta, Pinterest, display advertising and geo-targeting, while the company’s SEO, organic content and social media support the same overall strategy. A potential customer may encounter the company in one place, research it somewhere else and ultimately convert through Google.
In other words, the Google ad may get the final click, but it may not deserve all the credit.
Know When You Have the Expertise In-House
Best Impressions Caterers in Charlotte, North Carolina, offers another approach.
Santiago Diaz, vice president of sales and marketing for Combined Caterers—parent company for Best Impressions, Rocky Top Catering and Duvall Catering & Events—manages Google Ads in-house. He came to the role with previous paid-search experience from his career in consumer product goods and banking. He sees customer acquisition as having three primary levers: SEO, social media (TikTok specifically) and Google Ads.
The distinction is important. Google Ads aren’t the only advertising strategy. They’re a lever that can be pulled when the company wants to increase lead volume for a particular venue, service or season.
A good example is how he is marketing The Grand at 81 Mary, a venue designed and built by Duvall Catering & Events in Charleston, South Carolina. Because the venue is still growing its organic search authority, paid search can immediately put it in front of prospective clients searching for terms such as “Charleston weddings,” “weddings in Charleston” and “destination weddings.”
That’s particularly useful in a destination market. The prospective client may live hundreds of miles away and know little about the venue—or even the local market—but is already telling Google exactly what he or she is looking for.
That’s particularly useful in a destination market. The prospective client may live hundreds of miles away and know little about the venue—or even the local market—but is already telling Google exactly what he or she is looking for.
Generating the Right Leads at the Right Time
Diaz keeps that targeting tight. Rather than relying heavily on broad-match keywords, he primarily bids on exact search terms that demonstrate specific intent.
There’s also a practical reason for that strategy: inventory isn’t infinite. A venue has only so many Saturdays, holiday-party dates and other prime dates to sell. Generating the greatest possible number of clicks isn’t necessarily useful.
The goal is generating the right leads for the business you still have available to book.
Follow the Season—and the Customer
That brings up another theme that runs through all three approaches: seasonality matters.
Wedding advertising offers an obvious example.
“Wedding keywords see the strongest performance during engagement season and then normalize the rest of the year,” Ware says.
Rather than maintaining the same Google Ads budget throughout the year, the company adjusts spending to reflect the natural seasonality of the business.
And there is another consideration unique to hospitality: sometimes you simply don’t need more leads.
If the most desirable dates are already booked, spending aggressively to generate additional inquiries for those dates doesn’t make much sense. Google Ads can be turned up—or down—depending on the inventory that still needs to be sold.
Clicks Aren’t the Goal
One of the biggest distinctions Ware makes is between generating traffic and generating business.
“The most important metric to us is conversions because we don’t just want to drive more traffic—we want to drive the right traffic,” he says.
Catering by Michaels counts contact-form completions and phone calls as conversions. While the company monitors cost per click, Ware says clicks themselves aren’t particularly meaningful if those visitors don’t take the next step.
Diaz’s numbers illustrate the point.
Best Impressions dedicates approximately 17% of its total monthly marketing budget to Google Ads. Depending on the campaign, cost per click can run roughly 0.2% to 0.3% of that same monthly budget, while approximately 1% to 1.3% of the budget may be invested to generate a single conversion.
Diaz reports that Google Ads have helped increase lead volume from roughly 40 leads a month to 70 to 80 when campaigns are working efficiently.
For caterers, that’s a much more useful way to evaluate Google Ads than simply celebrating a growing number of website visitors.
Measuring ROI Isn’t Always as Easy as It Sounds
For all the sophisticated tracking available through digital advertising, connecting an ad to an actual catering sale can still be surprisingly difficult.
M Culinary Concepts is a case in point.
Donato estimates that the company invests roughly $25,000 to $40,000 per month in paid digital advertising, including agency fees, depending on the season and campaigns. That figure encompasses both M Culinary and its Nibblers drop-off catering business and is not simply its Google Ads spend.
For the company’s core catering operation, however, one significant event can justify a substantial amount of that investment.
The harder part is determining exactly which piece of marketing produced the business.
M Culinary’s catering software, Caterease, doesn’t have an open API that integrates cleanly with its marketing platforms. The company uses website tracking as a workaround and is developing a more regular process for pulling data from Caterease and connecting it back to marketing results.
But, as Donato puts it, “It’s not a perfect science.”
That’s worth remembering in a marketing world where nearly everything appears measurable. A prospective client may first see an Instagram post, encounter a display ad, visit the website, come back through Google and eventually make an inquiry.
Which channel gets credit?
Increasingly, the answer may be: all of them played a role.
Can AI Make In-House Advertising Easier?
AI is beginning to change not only how customers search, but how marketers manage the advertising itself.
That’s part of what makes Diaz comfortable keeping Google Ads in-house.
Approximately every two weeks, he uses Claude to analyze information from Google Ads alongside HubSpot data, website traffic and Google tracking data. He then uses that analysis to help make decisions within the Google Ads dashboard.
That doesn’t necessarily mean AI replaces the expertise of an agency. Diaz already has paid-search experience, and Best Impressions has internal marketing resources.
But AI can give someone with that knowledge considerably more analytical horsepower.
Is Google Search Starting to Change?
After two decades of strong performance, Ware has recently noticed something worth watching.
“In the past 12 to 18 months, we are starting to see some slowdown in results and have started to explore new opportunities, including LLM [large language model] optimization,” he says.
M Culinary is preparing for the same shift, using the term AEO, or Answer Engine Optimization. The company is working to make its websites easier for AI tools to understand and surface, including adding more robust FAQ content.
The terminology may vary, but the challenge is essentially the same: consumers increasingly have more ways to search.
Instead of simply typing “wedding caterer near me” into Google, a prospective client can ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude for recommendations, discover a caterer on Instagram, research a venue through Pinterest or follow any number of paths before making contact.
And AI-generated answers are now appearing within traditional search itself, occupying some of the same valuable real estate that businesses have traditionally competed for through SEO and paid advertising.
So what happens to the Google ad?
No one has that answer yet.
For these ECEP members, it doesn’t mean abandoning Google Ads. All three are still finding value in paid search. But they are also treating it as one piece of a much larger—and rapidly changing—marketing playbook.
Perhaps the question is no longer if Google Ads are worth the investment. Now it might be: Where do Google Ads fit into the way our customers find us now?
