Paid traffic into a broken Google listing is the most expensive way to discover that your hours are wrong.
It happens constantly. A restaurant has a quiet month, books a small ad budget, and sends people to a profile that says it closes at nine when it closes at ten, with no menu, four photos from the year it opened, and a one-star review from March still sitting there unanswered. The ads work perfectly. That is the problem.
The sequencing argument, briefly
Advertising increases the number of people who see you. It does nothing about what they find. If one in three of them bounces off a stale profile, you have not bought customers, you have bought a wider audience for a bad first impression, and you have paid per click for the privilege.
The fixes below take an afternoon and cost nothing. Do them first. Then decide about ads with better information, because you will finally be able to see what your listing does when it is working.
The list, in order
Google's own setup guide for restaurants covers most of this and is worth reading in full (sourced from Google).
Hours, including the ones you forget. Regular hours, holiday hours, and separate hours for delivery, takeout, drive-through and pickup where they differ. Holiday hours are the ones that burn people, because a customer who drives to a closed restaurant on a long weekend does not quietly update your profile for you.
The menu. Google lets you build a menu with sections, dishes, descriptions and prices, or set a preferred menu link. A menu that exists only as a PDF on your website is a menu that half of your customers will never open on a phone.
Ordering and reservation links. Online ordering and bookings can run directly from the profile. If you already use a provider, make sure the profile points to it, and check that the link goes to your restaurant rather than to a search page on someone else's platform.
Photos. The room, the food, the front of the building at night, and the menu itself. Which photos actually earn their place is a longer subject, and which Google Business Profile photos actually help goes through what the evidence does and does not support.
Attributes. Patio, accessible entrance, vegetarian options, kid-friendly, reservations required. These are how people filter, and an empty attribute set removes you from searches you would have won.
Review replies. Google says helpful and positive replies show that you are responsive to your customers, and it reviews every reply against its content policies before posting. Reply to the good ones briefly and the difficult ones carefully, in public, without arguing the facts.
What this actually costs you
An afternoon, a phone, and someone willing to sit down with the list. No agency required, and I would rather you did it yourself than pay anyone, including me, to do something this straightforward.
Put a recurring note in the calendar for the first week of every month to check hours against what is coming, add two photos and clear the unanswered reviews. Fifteen minutes. That is the whole maintenance programme.
Then, and only then, ads
Once the profile is doing its job, paid spend becomes a real question rather than a way of papering over one. The broader version of that decision, whether to fund content or ads first, is worked through in content marketing versus paid ads.
And when the answer genuinely is paid, how the ads work is written out rather than quoted on a call, so you can see what you would be buying before you talk to anyone.
A note if you run more than one location
Each location gets exactly one profile. Google's guidelines say not to create more than one page for each location of your business, in a single account or across multiple accounts (sourced from Google). Duplicate listings for one address split your reviews between them, which is a slow and annoying thing to unpick later.
So before the next campaign goes live, pull up your own listing on a phone, as a stranger would. Are the hours right for next weekend, and is there anything on it worth a click?