7.2. Paid Advertising

Two requirements before charging your card

Ad spend amplifies what works; it doesn't fix what's broken. You need a verified Business Profile with the correct primary category, updated hours, and your menu uploaded, as outlined in the lesson 3.1; and the active review stream (lesson 3.2), because the ad shows your rating, and driving paid traffic to a 3.2-star profile is paying to get compared and have someone else chosen.

Google: two campaigns, and neither is called “local”

Local campaigns ceased to exist as an independent campaign type: they were absorbed into Performance Max. If someone offers you "Google local campaigns," they are selling a menu option that is no longer in the interface.

Search with location and call assets

Path: Google Ads, Campaigns, plus button, Search. What used to be called extensions are now assets. The location asset pulls from your linked Business Profile and displays address, phone, hours, and ratings right inside the ad, complete with directions to Maps; the call asset lets users dial directly without visiting the website.

Keywords: those of the lesson 1.1 with high intent to buy right now. “Pizza delivery Querétaro” works; “how to make Neapolitan pizza dough” does not. Target by radius around the shop, never statewide.

Performance Max with store goals

It's the only campaign type that buys ad space inside Google Maps: promoted pins, map search ads, and local place cards. It also runs across Search, YouTube, Display, Gmail, and your own Business Profile. It requires a linked profile and optimizes for local actions: call clicks and direction clicks.

Regarding “store visits”: Mexico is among the eligible countries, but the metric requires privacy thresholds that a single-location pizzeria almost never meets. Commit to phone calls and directions, which are always counted.

Every search campaign requires a final landing URL, and that URL should never be your homepage: direct visitors straight to the menu with pricing and an order button. That is a true landing page.

Meta: radius is the defining decision

Meta has six objectives: Awareness, Traffic, Engagement, Leads, App promotion, and Sales. "Store traffic", the one every restaurant used to run, no longer appears among the ones you can create today. Use Traffic if the destination is your menu and Engagement if it is WhatsApp.

Target by dropping a pin over the location and choosing the radius: anchored to a pin, it starts at 1 km. If you type the city instead of dropping a pin, the dropdown won't let you go below 17 km, which means paying for half the metropolitan area. Use the pin and adjust the radius to your actual delivery zone.

On top go three modes: people living in the location, who were recently in it, or traveling there. “Recently in” is the Centro Sur office worker who lunches with you on weekdays and sleeps in Corregidora: by residential address, you'll never reach them. The creative is the vertical video you already shoot for social media, at no extra cost. That's how it's built in Meta Ads.

Starting budgets, in pesos

Google Ads charges on a daily budget and multiplies it by 30.4 for the monthly cap. Realistic figures to get started in Querétaro or Mexico City:

• Local search: $150 to $250 MXN per day, or between $4,560 and $7,600 per month.
• Meta with a tight radius: from $100 to $200 MXN per day per ad set.
• Performance Max: do not turn it on below $250 a day. It needs volume to exit the learning phase, and on less it runs blind.

Let them run for four weeks before judging them: changing bids every other day resets the learning phase and leaves you paying the expensive period over and over. We cover the entire structure in Google Ads.

Ad spend and fees are two separate expenses

This is where agency relationships fall apart. What you spend on ad spend isn't what it costs to build the campaigns.

• The pizzeria covers the ad spend, directly to Google and Meta, using the business's payment method and under accounts registered to the business, where you are the owner and the agency joins as an administrator. If you leave, you take your conversion history with you—which is the compounding asset.
• The fee covers the work: structure, creatives, negative keywords, conversion tracking, and monthly reporting. It's $2,500 MXN or $97 USD per month, the exact same monthly plan, with no percentage cut on your ad spend.

Be wary of agencies charging a percentage of ad spend: it rewards spending more, not selling more.

Keep this limit in mind: the day you pause your ads, that traffic stops. The work from lessons 1 to 6 remains. Advertising buys you the months it takes to build search visibility; it does not replace it.

Let someone else build and monitor your campaigns