Symposio
Greek restaurant · Google Search + Maps · bilingual campaigns
Symposio is a traditional Greek restaurant located near Syntagma Square in central Athens — one of the highest-traffic tourist areas in Europe. The restaurant serves brunch, lunch, and dinner to a mixed audience of Athenian locals and international visitors.
Campaign launched from zero in February 2026. The dual-audience challenge was the primary structural decision: locals and tourists search with different language, different intent framing, and different expectations from the copy. A single merged campaign would have diluted messaging for both.
Two parallel campaign tracks — one per language — each with 6 ad groups segmented by meal type. Every ad group has dedicated copy in its language targeting a specific search context.
Competitors by restaurant name
Other cuisines (sushi, pizza, Mexican, Korean, Chinese, Arabic)
Budget signals (cheap, budget, fast food, promo)
Unrelated toponyms outside Athens
Non-food business terms
Peak lunch decision window. Users searching in this window are making an immediate dining decision — not planning abstractly. Concentrating budget here eliminates cold evening impressions that do not convert to visits.
All conversions represent real guest intent actions. Directions are the primary KPI — a direction request means the user is navigating to the restaurant, not just browsing.
Google Maps route requests — primary KPI
Clicks-to-call from ad placements
Online reservations and orders
971K impressions · 3.1% CTR
Responsive Search Ads written separately for each language. Headlines rotate to match the search query; descriptions reinforce the location and atmosphere. Samples below.
Emphasis on location and quality signals for tourists making fast decisions
Emphasis on atmosphere and authenticity for local dining decisions
Running a Greek campaign and an English campaign is not about having two ad copies. It's about recognizing that a local Athenian and a tourist from London have completely different search intent, different emotional context for their dining decision, and different expected messaging. 'Authentic Greek food near me' and 'Αυθεντική ελληνική κουζίνα Αθήνα' are different audiences — combining them in one campaign serves neither correctly.
A user searching 'best brunch Athens' is not looking for a dinner restaurant that also has brunch. They want confirmation that this restaurant specifically is known for brunch. An ad from the Brunch – EN group with a brunch-specific headline and description answers that search precisely. A generic 'Greek restaurant in Athens' ad does not. Granularity is why CTR stays at 3.1%.
Restaurant dining decisions are made close in time to the meal. A user searching at 11:30 for 'lunch near Syntagma' is making an immediate decision — and will likely act on it within the hour. A user searching at 22:00 for 'lunch near Syntagma' is browsing, not deciding. Concentrating budget on the decision window means every impression competes for a user who is ready to visit — not one who is planning abstractly.
Athens is a major tourist destination with enormous search volume for restaurants — most of it irrelevant to Symposio. Competitors, wrong cuisines, budget-seeking queries, delivery platforms, job listings, and unrelated business terms all bid on overlapping queries. Filtering 463 terms across Greek, English, Italian, Chinese, and Arabic removes the non-converting impression volume that would otherwise inflate CPC and train the algorithm on the wrong users.
Account built from zero in February 2026. Over 10 weeks: 7,806 direction conversions — people who physically navigated to the restaurant through Google — plus 423 bookings and 459 calls. €0.69 CPA across all action types. 3.1% CTR maintained across bilingual campaigns. €6,015 total ad spend. 463 negative keywords across 5 languages kept CPC at €0.20.
Optimization: 463 negatives · 5 languages · ad schedule 11:00–14:00
Result: 7,806 Directions · €0.69 CPA · 3.1% CTR · €0.20 CPC
Client name is real. Report ID is internal. All conversion figures from actual Google Ads account data. Campaign ongoing — figures current as of May 2026.