Guide

How to Tell If a Restaurant Promotion Actually Worked

You ran a promotion, the dining room was busier than usual, and it felt like a success. But a busy day and a profitable promotion aren't the same thing. The only way to know if a promotion paid off is to compare it against what would have happened without it, and to count what the discount cost you.

Here's how to check using the reports you already have in Square.

Decide what "worked" means before you look

A promotion can succeed at one thing and fail at another. Before you open any reports, decide which of these you were actually after:

More customers: more orders than a normal day.
Bigger tickets: the same number of orders, but more spent per order.
A slow day filled in: more business on a day or hour that's usually quiet.
Moving a specific item: more of one dish or drink sold.

Each goal points to a different number. A promotion that brought in more orders but lowered your average ticket may have hit its goal, or it may have just given a discount to customers who were coming anyway.

Compare before, during, and after

Looking only at the promotion days tells you almost nothing. You need three windows:

Before: the same weekdays in the weeks leading up to the promotion. This is your normal.
During: the days the promotion ran.
After: the same weekdays in the weeks after it ended.

Compare like with like. A Tuesday promotion should be measured against other Tuesdays, not against a Saturday. In the Square Dashboard, Sales Summary shows your sales for any date range, and Sales Trends compares one period against another, so you can line up the promotion weeks against the weeks around them.

The after window matters more than most owners expect. If sales jump during the promotion and then fall below normal afterward, customers may have just shifted visits they were already going to make. If sales settle back to normal or stay a little higher, the promotion brought in real new business.

Look at orders and average ticket, not just total sales

Total sales can hide what actually happened. Split it into two numbers: how many orders you ran, and the average ticket, which is your sales divided by the number of orders.

If orders went up and the average ticket held steady, the promotion brought in more customers. If orders stayed flat and the average ticket rose, it got existing customers to spend more. If orders went up but the average ticket dropped a lot, many customers may have come in, ordered only the deal, and left.

Check what else people ordered

A promotion on one item is supposed to bring people in for the rest of the menu too. Pull the Item Sales report in Square for the promotion days and compare it with the same weekdays before. If the promoted item sold well but everything else stayed flat or dropped, the deal may have replaced full-price orders instead of adding to them.

Count what the discount cost

In Square, a discount reduces what you collect, so it shows up in your sales as lower revenue, and in the discount report as the total amount discounted. Give every promotion its own named discount in Square so the discount report can show you exactly how much that promotion cost. An unnamed or open discount only tells you that money was discounted, not which promotion it came from.

Do the break-even math

A discount comes straight out of your profit, because the item costs the same to make no matter what you charge for it. That means a promotion has to sell a lot more than most owners expect just to break even.

Say a dish sells for $10 and costs $3 to make, leaving $7 in profit. Take 20% off, and it sells for $8, leaving $5 in profit. To earn the same $7 per original sale, you'd need to sell 40% more of that dish during the promotion. If sales of that item rose less than that, the promotion earned you less than a normal day would have, even if the dining room felt busier.

Run this math before the promotion, not just after. Knowing the break-even point ahead of time tells you whether a discount level is realistic at all.

Watch for things that skew the comparison

Promotions rarely run in a vacuum. Before crediting or blaming a promotion, check whether anything else was different during those days: a holiday, a local event, a stretch of unusual weather, a menu change, or a staffing shortage. Any of these can make a promotion look better or worse than it really was. The longer your before and after windows, the less a single odd day can throw off the result.

See what this looks like

Below is a live Flumen restaurant dashboard. This is the single page view of the numbers that would otherwise require navigating several Square reports and a separate spreadsheet for costs.

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See your sales clearly, all in one place

Square's reports show you one view at a time. Flumen connects to your Square account and builds a dashboard with your daily revenue, your average sales and ticket for each day of the week, your orders by hour, and which menu items sell on which days.

See Your Restaurant's Dashboard Free

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Frequently asked questions

How long should I run a promotion before judging it?

Long enough to cover the same weekdays several times. A single day is easy to skew with weather or an event. Comparing several of the same weekday before, during, and after gives you a much clearer answer.

Can Square tell me if a promotion made money?

Not directly. Square shows your sales, orders, item sales, and how much you discounted, but it doesn't show what each item cost you to make. To know whether a promotion made money, compare the extra sales against the discount and your item costs.

Why did my sales go up but my profit didn't?

Usually because the discount cost more than the extra sales brought in. A 20% discount on an item with a 70% margin means you need about 40% more sales of that item just to earn the same profit you would have without the promotion.

See what Square's discount and comp reports show, and what they leave out

See how to find your slowest days and hours in Square