Same Brand. Cost Per Booking Halved.
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A busy paid media account. No clear line from spend to bookings.
How EDGEY rebuilt San Carlo's paid media around the only question that matters: what is it costing to fill a table?
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55% lower cost per booking on Meta
175 bookings per £1,000 spent, up from 78
1,596 bookings in our first three months
£5.16 per booking on Meta in September
San Carlo Restaurant Group is a collection of well-loved Italian restaurants across the UK, including San Carlo, Cicchetti and Fumo. When we took over their paid media in July, there was no shortage of activity. Easter pushes, Mother's Day pushes, traffic campaigns, and three different booking conversions on Google in twelve months. What there wasn't was a simple answer to what each booking was actually costing. So we started there.
Phase 1: Stop paying for the wrong thing.
Before we built anything, we looked at where the money was going. A big share of the Meta budget sat in traffic campaigns, optimised for page views rather than bookings. They returned 111 bookings at £83.60 each, and none of that spend was feeding useful data further down the funnel. Same brand, a fraction of the efficiency, purely because of what those campaigns were built to do. We moved that budget into campaigns built to drive bookings.
We also fixed the measurement. Google had cycled through three different booking conversions in a year, so we rebuilt it on one: General Booking. One conversion, one source of truth.
Phase 2: Rebuild around the booking.
Every live campaign now optimises to a completed booking. Not clicks, not page views, not "interest". We then broke the account down by site. The venues that needed a specific push got their own campaigns on both Meta and Google, with their own budget and their own creative. Those site-level campaigns went on to become some of the best performers in the account.
Phase 3: Back what works.
Budgets only step up where the cost per booking holds. Nothing scales while it's still learning. September shows how that plays out: Meta delivered 22% more bookings than June on 42% less spend, bringing cost per booking down to £5.16 from £10.77.
What it proved...
The cheapest bookings were always there. The account just wasn't set up to find them. Meta's cost per booking more than halved, from £12.75 to £5.71, and Google's fell from £22.17 to £9.39. It wasn't one lever. We rebuilt the structure around bookings, reworked the audiences to reach the people most likely to book, gave the sites that needed it their own budget and creative, and fixed the measurement so every decision could be judged on real results. Each piece made the next one work harder.
Efficiency isn't about spending less. It's about knowing exactly what you're buying, and who you're buying it for.
