Break-even: how many meals make marketing worth it?

Whether marketing pays off for a restaurant comes down to one division: divide the monthly cost by what you keep on one meal. For a 153,000 HUF Google package (fee + ad budget) with a 3,500 HUF lunch menu, that’s 67 extra menus a month, two or three a day. An in-house marketer with the ad budget costs about 855,000 HUF a month: that’s 376 menus.

How do you work out whether it pays off?

With a break-even calculation: divide your monthly marketing cost by what you keep on each meal sold. The result is the number of extra meals a month at which marketing breaks even. Everything above that is profit.

Monthly marketing cost ÷ what you keep per meal = extra meals needed per month

In the examples we use a 65% margin for all three restaurant types (the share of the selling price left after ingredients) and 26 opening days a month (6 days a week). That’s an assumption: your margin may differ, so at the end of the article we also show you how to work out your own. Use net prices; we rounded to keep it easy to follow.

What does this look like for three types of restaurant?

The bigger the basket, the fewer extra guests you need. A dinner restaurant needs one a day, a lunch-menu place two or three.

For the ad budget we used our own clients’ average: the 8 restaurants whose Google Ads we manage spent between 38,000 and 81,000 HUF a month on ads, about 54,000 on average (Google Ads data up to 8 August 2026).

How much does an in-house marketer cost?

About 801,000 HUF a month for the employer, without any advertising. According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office (KSH), the average gross monthly salary of marketing and PR clerks in 2025 was 709,026 HUF (638,995 HUF for those under 30); on top of that comes the 13% social contribution tax.

They also need an ad budget, because Google and Meta charge you for the ads, not them. With the same 54,000 HUF, that’s about 855,000 HUF a month.

The bigger problem isn’t even the money. A restaurant doesn’t need a marketer for a whole month, only a few hours a month to set up, monitor and measure the campaign. And one person rarely knows Google ads, Meta ads, measurement and food photography all at once.

How much does it cost to do it yourself?

In money, the least, just the budget: about 24 extra guests a month with a lunch menu. In time, the most, and you have to take that time away from the kitchen.

This is the work that comes with it:

• maintaining your Google Business Profile: menu, prices, opening hours, holidays
• taking and uploading food photos, posting the daily menu
• monitoring and replying to reviews
• setting up the campaign in Google Ads: area, targeting, budget, ad copy
• weekly monitoring: where the money goes, what isn’t working
• measurement: how many direction requests, calls and online orders came in, and what each cost
• watching the neighbourhood: who shows up before you at lunchtime, and why

You know how many hours that is for you. Multiply it by what an hour of yours is worth. Maintaining the profile works fine on your own; here are three tips. The campaign part is where, without experience, most money leaks away.

What’s in an agency fee?

With us, Google Ads management is 99,000 HUF a month, Meta ads management also 99,000 HUF, and the two together 175,000 HUF. The ad budget comes on top, and you pay it directly to Google or Meta. Details are in our pricing.

For the fee you get the campaign setup, ongoing monitoring and a monthly report showing how much we spent, what it brought and what’s worth changing.

What do you get for the money?

Measured guest actions: direction requests, calls, online orders. At our 8 restaurants, one measured action cost between 152 and 6,006 HUF (Google Ads data up to 8 August 2026), and the difference depends mainly on what the account measures. Where we also measure direction requests, one action costs a few hundred forints. Where we only measure online orders, several thousand.

So the question isn’t “are ads expensive?”, but what you buy with them and how many of those become guests. We don’t promise guest numbers, but we show you how to do the maths. If you need two or three lunch menus a day to break even, the thing to look at is how many of the people who set off each month sit down at your place, and how many come back the following week. What that looks like at lunchtime we showed through one office worker’s journey.

When doesn’t it pay off?

When visibility isn’t the problem. We don’t recommend it in three situations:

1. The business is losing money. If nothing is left over now, fix the operation first; ads won’t solve that.
2. You’re full at peak times. More guests then mean a queue, not revenue, so it’s the quiet slots worth targeting: afternoons and weekday evenings.
3. Very low revenue. If the monthly marketing cost would eat a large part of your revenue, take a smaller, free step first: sorting out your profile.

What to do on Monday?

Take out your till data and work out your own break-even:

1. What’s your average basket at lunch and at dinner?
2. How much do you keep on an average basket, net price minus ingredients?
3. Divide the monthly costs above (153,000, 855,000 and 54,000 HUF + your time) by that, then the result by 26.

If you’d like to run it with your own numbers, ask for a free ad review: we’ll look at your current ads and tell you how much budget you need and what’s worth measuring.

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