Aussie Grill Makes a Big-Auss Impression with a New Digital Strategy

Aussie Grill, an exciting fast-casual restaurant concept inspired by the bold flavors of Outback Steakhouse, worked with Roger West’s digital team to expand its audience reach efficiently and promote the opening of its latest restaurant location.

Industry  /  Restaurant

Despite being a newcomer to the fast-casual restaurant scene, Aussie Grill has carved out a niche for itself with a daring menu and friendly service that delivers fantastic food fast. Throughout 2022, the restaurant relied on big changes like menu updates and new store openings to boost its digital media presence. Hoping to close out the year with a bang, Aussie Grill turned to the Roger West digital media team to develop a strategy that would increase impressions and improve campaign efficiency while also pushing more customers to its newest restaurant location.

Solutions

  • Paid Search Strategy
  • PPC Management
  • SEO Research
  • Evergreen & Store Opening Campaigns
  • Google Display Network, Meta, Google Search, & Yelp ads
  • Reporting Data Analytics
  • Ad & Landing Page Design
  • A/B Testing

The Solution

The Roger West team got started by analyzing Aussie Grill’s digital media budget. After identifying what was working and finding opportunities for improvement, the team shifted spending to align a higher budget toward Google Display Network (GDN). This adjustment would expand campaign visibility, exposing more people to newly redesigned content and messaging. Even with an increase in ad spending to support a campaign for a new Aussie Grill location, the Roger West team was confident that the new strategy would improve the restaurant’s cost per impression (CPM).

With a little help from the Roger West creative department, the digital team reoptimized existing evergreen campaigns to prioritize GDN while still focusing on conversion-heavy platforms like Yelp!. At the same time, a new campaign was launched to encourage people to learn about and visit the newest Aussie Grill location, which was opening in December.

Some of these measures included:

  • Reoptimized evergreen campaigns to drive brand awareness.
  • Geo-targeted messaging campaign to highlight new location.
  • SEO analysis to identify new paid media opportunities.
  • Sponsored search ads for Google, Meta, and Yelp!.
  • Copy and design content increase ad engagement.
  • A/B testing to gather performance data for existing and future campaigns.
  • Campaign monitoring with daily spending adjustments and regular reporting (weekly & monthly)

The final two months of 2022 produced more than 18 million impressions, which was more than the previous 10 months combined. Even better, those impressions didn’t come at the expense of campaign efficiency, despite the fact that the overall ad budget increased. Aussie Grill’s digital ads posted a CPM of $1.88 in November and $2.07 in December, a staggering 79% reduction in the average CPM over the previous 10 months. The campaigns coincided with the biggest boost in store traffic and sales outside of a new menu rollout, with December standing out as the best month of the year in terms of visits, revenue, and impressions.

Search and Yelp! ads drove 78% of overall conversions, and optimizations to Yelp! ads translated into an impressive 26.2% conversion rate. The campaign also pushed 6.7K visitors to the website for Aussie Grill’s newest location, and the store opening campaign contributed 2.2M impressions to the overall initiative. Taken as a whole, the results put Aussie Grill on firm ground for continued success in 2023.

Results

18.9M

digital media impressions

79%

reduction in average CPM

6.7K

visitors to new location page