We Took a Caterer From 1 Catering Order a Month to 40 in Four Weeks. Here’s What We Changed.

The caterer was already spending on Google Ads through another agency and had been for the last year. On top of that, they were paying $350 a month for a competing catering platform that, by their own admission, wasn’t paying for itself — one catering order a month doesn’t justify that overhead, let alone the ad spend on top.

When we opened the Google Ads account, the pattern was immediately familiar: lots of clicks but no conversions. For context, the kinds of things we typically see in these audits:

• A dozen near-identical ad groups all bidding on broad-match variations of “catering Los Angeles,” all pointing at the homepage
• A Performance Max campaign burning through the budget with no proper conversion tracking, every ad routed to a single generic contact page, regardless of whether someone searched for office catering, wedding catering, or a birthday platter.

A lot of agencies build their catering campaigns using automation tools originally designed for e-commerce or general lead gen, then apply the same playbook to catering without adjustment. The tools optimise for what their creators know how to measure — clicks, form fills, low-consideration purchases — not for what actually drives a catering booking.

Catering is a different animal. The buying window is usually 3–14 days out, not same-day. The average order is 20–100x the value of a coffee. And the highest-lifetime-value customers are corporate accounts placing recurring orders, not one-off enquiries. Generic optimisation stacks have no idea any of that is true.

We killed the existing campaigns and rebuilt from scratch. Two things mattered more than the rest.

Service-specific ad groups with service-specific landing pages. The caterer was pitching corporate offices, wedding planners, and birthday hosts with the same ad copy pointing at the same page. We split the campaign into three ad groups — corporate, weddings, events — each with its own creative and its own landing page inside Easy Flow Catering. Someone searching “office catering [suburb]” now lands on a page about office catering, not a generic menu. Message match is the single biggest lever most catering campaigns are missing, and it’s cheap to fix.

Conversion tracking wired into the platform. Easy Flow Catering pushes completed orders back to Google Ads and GA4 as conversions, with the order value included. This is table stakes for any campaign that spends real money, and it’s astonishing how many catering accounts we audit don’t have it set up properly. Without it, Google’s algorithm is optimising blind — you’re paying for the guesswork.

The numbers, one month in

Put differently: the first order of the month covered their software cost. Everything after that was margin.

Easy Flow Catering provides a destination for your Google Ads campaigns, where you can promote and track catering orders. When combined with Google Ads, our customers generate over 40 catering orders per month.

At Easy Flow Catering, our mission is to help you win more catering orders. We have Google Ads specialists who have worked with over 30+ caterers like you to help create winning Google Ads campaigns.

You can run a Shopping or Search campaign to advertise your catering business. Set your Easy Flow Catering platform as the destination for your Google Ads campaign. You can create multiple pages in Easy Flow Catering which allows you to cater to your desired audience.

For example, you may serve corporate, weddings and birthday catering. Create a page for each service offering and a corresponding Ad Group in Google Ads. This will make sure your customers see content related to their Google Search.

Use our Google Ads and Google Analytics integration to track conversions. This allows you to send data back to your Google Ads account when a customer completes a catering order on your website. This conversion data is key to optimising your Google Ads campaigns.

If you’re already running Google Ads for your catering business, do this today: open your account, look at how many ad groups you have, and check whether each one points at a landing page that specifically matches its ad copy. If you have one page doing the work of three or four ad groups, that’s your first fix — and in our experience it’s the fastest single improvement most catering accounts can make.

If you want a second set of eyes on your account, book a free demo here.