The commission is bigger than the margin

A restaurant marketing agency helps fill covers and improve what each cover earns. In practice that splits into three jobs: being findable when someone is deciding where to eat, converting that attention into an order or a booking, and bringing guests back through a channel you own rather than one that charges commission. The part most owners underestimate is the margin side, because a restaurant can be busier and less profitable at the same time when volume arrives through a channel that takes 25 to 30% of the ticket.

Published 2026 rate cards put base commission at roughly 15 to 30% depending on tier, with pickup listed separately and lower. Most independents report the blended real cost landing between 25 and 35% once delivery, payment processing and marketing fees stack. Set that against the National Restaurant Association's median income before taxes of 2.8% of sales at full-service restaurants and 4.0% at limited-service, and the commission is several times larger than the entire profit margin. Lower commission tiers also buy less visibility inside the app, which is why most independents end up on the higher ones.

Usually not entirely. Marketplaces are genuinely effective at discovery, and a first-time guest found there is a guest you did not have. The mistake is treating a discovery channel as a primary revenue channel. The approach most successful operators land on is a hybrid: marketplaces to be found, your own ordering path for repeat guests, and a deliberate effort to move people from the first to the second. Roughly two thirds of diners say they would order directly from a restaurant if the price were the same, so the barrier is usually awareness and convenience rather than loyalty.

Because a PDF is effectively a picture of words. Search engines cannot reliably extract dish names, descriptions and prices from it, it cannot carry structured data, and on a phone it forces pinching and zooming. Since 77% of diners check a menu online before deciding, that makes your most-read asset your least readable one. Converting a forty-item menu to plain HTML with proper markup creates dozens of new ways to be found, because every dish becomes a phrase someone might search and every dietary tag becomes a filter you can appear in.

Menu schema is structured data using the Schema.org vocabulary: a Menu contains MenuSection, which contains MenuItem, each carrying an Offer with a price and currency, all attached to your Restaurant entity alongside address, hours, cuisine and service options. It does not guarantee a specific Google rich result the way review markup can, and any agency promising you a menu carousel is overselling. What it reliably does is make your dishes machine-readable, make your business entity coherent, and make you quotable to AI assistants that cross-reference structured data as a trust signal when building recommendations.

By being legible. When someone asks an assistant for somewhere nearby that is open late with a good vegetarian main, the assistant needs facts it can rely on: location, hours, cuisine, price range, service options and what is actually on the menu. Restaurants that publish those in structured, readable form can be recommended confidently. Restaurants whose menu is a PDF and whose hours are stale get skipped, and unlike the delivery apps there is no bid that fixes it. Consistent information across your site, your business profile and the directories you appear in matters more here than clever copy.

They are tap-to-open stickers and cards for tables, counters and takeout bags. A guest holds their phone near one and your menu opens immediately, with no app and no QR code to line up in low light. The valuable part is what follows: from that page they can save your menu to their home screen in two taps, which puts you on the device beside the apps they use daily. A guest with your menu saved opens you directly instead of browsing a marketplace full of competitors, and the order that follows costs you a card fee rather than a commission.

Similar destination, worse experience, and we supply both. A QR code needs decent light, a steady hand and a camera app, and many diners now associate them with the pandemic-era menus they disliked. A tap is instant and works in a dim dining room. The more important point is that neither one matters unless the page they open is a fast, readable, structured menu with a clear way to order, call or save. The sticker is the easy part.