Toast Advertising FAQs

When using Toast Advertising, it is recommended that you also use Toast Online Ordering and/or Toast Catering & Events for the optimal experience, however, this is not required.

 

To run campaigns with Google, you’re required to have a Google Business Profile for your business. To run campaigns with Meta, you must have an existing Facebook page for your business. It is recommended that you also have an Instagram account for your business, but not required.

 

Can I run Toast Advertising campaigns if I use a non-Toast provider for online ordering?

 

Toast Advertising is accessible to Toast Web users with the 4.8 Marketing Info or 4.1 Sales Reports permission enabled. Any employees with these permissions are able to access Toast Advertising.

 

As a Toast Advertising customer, the minimum average daily budget is $10 in ad-spend per campaign. We require you to spend at least $10 per day to ensure that each campaign has enough activity to learn and optimize. You will set the average daily budget for your campaigns in Toast Advertising.

 

Toast Marketing offers a suite of tools to create and manage email and SMS marketing campaigns. Toast Advertising is a separate tool that lets you run paid advertising campaigns on Google and Meta (Instagram and Facebook).

Toast Advertising is not part of the Marketing suite today, and you do not need to pay for a Marketing subscription in order to use the Toast Advertising features.

 

If you have multiple business locations, Toast Advertising will allow you to connect all locations during onboarding. You will be able to map Google Business Profiles and Facebook/Instagram pages to their corresponding locations during setup. 

When you set up a new campaign, you will choose which connected location you want to run it for. You must select one location for each campaign you create in Toast Advertising, and can only select one location per campaign. You do not have to run campaigns for every location.

 

Note: You will need to purchase Toast Advertising for each location you wish to connect.

 

No, Toast Advertising can only be accessed by Live customers.

 

How do I pause my Toast Advertising campaigns?

 

 

The Toast Advertising reporting dashboard allows you to see near real-time reporting for your campaigns. The Campaign Summary View shows you all of your live campaigns with key metrics like ad-spend, orders from the ad, return on ad spend (or ROAS), impressions, and clicks.

You can also find reporting for each campaign, including a breakdown of performance across online ordering, catering, and/or estimated on-premise orders along with more detailed metrics like cost per conversion, click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC), and more.

Why does my ad spend in Toast Advertising reporting not match the amounts in my billing statement?

When setting your campaign budget in Toast Advertising, you are effectively setting the limit for the most you’re willing to spend on your campaign. It is not always guaranteed that you’ll spend the full budget, but Toast Advertising is designed to get as close as possible.

Occasionally, campaigns will spend slightly less than the budgeted amount. Even in cases where the budget is spent in full, some spend may later be subtracted via invalid traffic filtering as mentioned above. 

 

There are many factors that may influence campaign performance. It is to be expected that not all campaigns will perform the same.

Most campaigns undergo a “learning phase” in the first two or more weeks after launching. During this time, performance may be lower as the optimization engines learn which variables have the most impact on performance. Performance typically improves after this learning period. Performance may also fluctuate due to seasonality or other external factors. 

 

Keyword themes are words or phrases that help match your ads with Google searches. Selecting the right keyword themes helps you reach people when they’re looking for businesses like yours. A single keyword theme represents multiple similar words and phrases. For instance, the keyword theme “bakery” makes your ad eligible to show when people search for things like “bakery near me,” “local bakery,” and “cake shop.”

 

Toast Advertising will provide a set of keyword themes for you to choose from. Choose the themes that most accurately describe your business and what you would expect users to search for when looking for your business or offering.

 

We recommend selecting a keyword theme that includes the name of your business if one is available. These are sometimes called branded keywords. Including branded keyword themes helps ensure that your business shows up first when users are searching for you. Branded keywords help drive efficiencies for your campaign overall and help ensure competitors aren’t showing up first when your customers are looking for you.

 

Toast Advertising billing can be accessed by navigating to Advertising > Billing > Billing Statement. Your invoice can also be found in your Toast Account by navigating to Toast Web > Toast Account > Billing > Billing & Invoicing. For more information on billing and invoices, see .

 

 

If you use Toast Online Ordering, Toast Catering & Events, and/or Toast Tables you can choose any of those as your primary campaign goal. This setting will inform which page your ads drive to as well as the recommended content for your ads.

Regardless of what you choose as your primary goal, we will track and report on any eligible conversion or purchase activities attributed to your campaign. This means your reporting will always show how your campaign drove Toast online orders, Toast online catering orderings, and/or Toast Tables reservations - in addition to estimated on-premise sales.

If you’re new to advertising with Google, we recommend setting up your campaign to drive regular online orders with Toast. These campaigns will be tailored to reach users actively searching for products or services near them and have shown success in driving both online orders and visits to the business.

 

When onboarding to Toast Advertising, you will be prompted to grant Toast permission to create new Google Ads accounts on your behalf to house and run your campaigns. It is not possible to link an existing Google Ads account to Toast Advertising. The newly-created account will be totally separate from your existing Google accounts. You will not have access to the Toast Advertising accounts in Google Ads directly. Instead, you will view and manage your accounts through Toast Advertising. 

 

When you run a Google Ads campaign through Toast Advertising, your campaign will run on Google Search and Google Maps, which may drive users to order online or to visit your business in person. For example, when your ads appear on Google Maps, they include a Directions button that users can click to navigate directly to your business.

The on-premise ROAS is an estimate based on a variety of inputs. When campaigns first launch, we take the number of users who click the Directions button on your ad and multiply that by 30% to get estimated on-premise orders. We then multiply that by your average on-premise order value to get the total estimated on-premise order value. Estimated on-premise ROAS for Google campaigns is calculated using the average on-premise order value for your business over the past four months.

For campaigns that have been running for several weeks, we are often able to get a metric called Store Visits from Google, which estimates the number of people who visited your business after engaging with your Ad. Once Store Visits are available, we use this number instead of relying on clicks on the Directions button to provide us guidance. 

 

Currently Toast Advertising does not support audience targeting on Google campaigns. These campaigns are designed to reach users showing high intent to visit or purchase from your business and are optimized accordingly. We expect Google campaigns to both find new guests and re-engage existing guests.

 

Google campaigns are designed to be “always on,” meaning they are an effective way to continuously drive traffic (both online and in-person) to your business. Users are always searching for businesses near them, and keeping your Google campaigns running is a great way to capture that ongoing demand.

Google campaigns will continue to optimize the longer they run, meaning that performance often improves over time. It’s important to let campaigns run for at least two weeks after setting them up before making any major changes. This period is known as the “learning period,” which means the optimization engine is learning about how users interact with your ad.

 

When you onboard to Toast Advertising, you will grant Toast access to your Google Business Profile. Specifically, you are granting the email address access to your Google Business Profile. This access is what helps us run campaigns on your behalf and helps ensure the ads are showing accurate information about your business.

You can remove Toast’s access to your Google Business Profile at any time by logging in with Google and removing the user profile. When you remove Toast’s permission to access your Google Business Profile, existing Google Ads campaigns in Toast Advertising will likely see a decrease in performance, as we will be unable to record estimated on-premise sales. In addition, you will no longer be able to create new campaigns.

 

If you are having issues linking your Google Business Profile or Google My Business account to Toast Advertising, double check that you have an existing Google Business Profile and that you’re using the correct login information. When onboarding to Toast Advertising, you must log in to Google with the account that has Owner access to your Google Business Profile. If you are still having trouble, please contact Customer Care for assistance.

 

When you set your budget, you are choosing an average daily budget, not a daily maximum. Google will optimize your campaign spend for days of the month when you’re more likely to get clicks and conversions, like when search traffic is higher or when we predict higher ROI for your ads. This means that your daily budget might fluctuate– on some days you might not reach your average daily budget, and on others you might exceed it.

 

To receive the Spend $500, Get $500 promotion, you are required to spend $500 on a Google Ads campaign within the first 60 days of onboarding to Toast Advertising. The $500 spend requirement does not include the Toast Advertising 15% usage fee that is added to your invoice. 

Once you hit $500 in Google spend, you may receive a $500 in Google Ads credit that will be applied to future ad spend.

If you do not reach the $500 Google spend requirement in the first 60 days after onboarding, you will not receive the credit. It is your responsibility to ensure that you choose a daily budget high enough to hit the spend requirement. We recommend setting your budget slightly higher to account for any potential underspend. 

Eligibility for the promotion is subject to additional terms, including terms from Toast and Google. To review the Google terms, please see (external). If you have previously used Toast Advertising  or Google Ads and redeemed a similar coupon, you may not be eligible for this promotion.

What is required to successfully connect Meta to Toast Ads?

When onboarding to Meta in Toast Ads, you will be asked to login with your Meta/Facebook login credentials. You must login with the Meta login that has admin access to the page(s) you wish to link to Toast Ads as well as the existing Meta Business Manager that owns those pages, if relevant.

If your pages belong to a Business Manager that you do not have admin access to, you will need to contact Meta support directly and request to claim ownership of those pages.

What do I do if I have more than ten locations I want to onboard to Meta Ads?

If you have more than ten locations you wish to onboard to Toast Ads for Meta, reach out to the Toast Ads team at . You can begin by choosing ten locations to start, and we will support you directly in linking additional locations.

How is return on ad spend (ROAS) calculated for Meta campaigns?

Like with Google campaigns, ROAS for Meta is calculated by dividing total sales attributed to the campaign by the total ad spend. The overall sales numbers for Meta campaigns is a combination of Toast online, catering, and on-premise sales attributed to your campaign. Sales are attributed to your campaign using Meta’s attribution technology. Meta is able to determine if a user who places an order was exposed to or interacted with your Meta ad campaign.

Can I see how the sales driven by my Meta campaign are distributed across online, on-premise, and catering?

Today Meta only supports the ability to report on overall return for a given campaign. We are not able to segment the return by channel (OO, catering, on-premise) like we are for Google. As Meta campaigns are well suited for driving awareness of and engagement with your business, the ROAS is just one of several metrics that give a view into campaign performance.

Should I run Google and Meta ad campaigns at the same time?

Generally speaking, Google and Meta ad campaigns through Toast are designed to work together. Meta ads are a great way to drive awareness of your business and reach new customers with lookalike targeting capabilities. 

Meta campaigns may not always drive a high return on ad spend (ROAS), as users who see your ads on Facebook and Instagram may not be actively looking to place an order. Google campaigns are designed to help your business show up when potential customers are actively searching in their area. ROAS tends to be higher as the audience is more likely to be looking to place an order or make a purchase.

When creating a Meta campaign, you can choose to either target primarily new customers or all users. When you target new customers, we will automatically create a Meta lookalike audience based on your Toast Guestbook and/or your existing Meta page followers. If you choose all users, your campaign will likely reach a mix of new and existing customers.

 

 

No, today Toast Advertising only supports images and text for Meta campaigns.