TL;DR: Brett Linkletter, CEO and co-founder of Dishio, came out of e-commerce advertising, where nobody spends a dollar they can’t trace, and walked into a restaurant industry where almost nobody can. His first restaurant client saw a 7% sales lift across 37 stores in three months — and Brett was so used to 10x e-commerce returns that he thought he was about to get fired. In this episode we get into how you actually connect an ad to a guest walking through your door: Google’s store-visit tracking, QR-code menus as the conversion event, and why the money is in marketing to a third visit rather than chasing another first one.
In this episode
- Guest: Brett Linkletter, CEO and co-founder, Dishio
- Company: Dishio — restaurant guest-data and marketing platform, part of Dishio Holdings, alongside the agency Dineline
- Host: Jeremy Julian, President & Chief Revenue Officer, CBS NorthStar
- Also mentioned: Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp), Google, Google Maps, Google My Business, Toast, Jon Taffer, USC
Why Can’t Most Restaurants Track Their Marketing?
Because the industry grew up selling in person, and everything that made e-commerce measurable happens online. That’s the short answer, and it’s the thing Brett has been chewing on for a decade. A restaurant runs an ad, sales go up a little, and nobody can draw a straight line between the two. So the ad budget becomes a feeling instead of a number.
Brett didn’t start in restaurants. He started in e-commerce advertising in 2015 and 2016, which he calls the glory days — a photo of a pair of sunglasses on a white background could return 10, 15, 20 times what you spent on it, because almost nobody was competing for the impression. In that world the discipline is brutal and simple: if you can’t prove the return, you’re gone.
“You have a large majority of restaurant operators and marketers that are spending thousands of dollars online, yet they can’t even see the return on investment. So they’re essentially just lighting money on fire.” — Brett Linkletter, CEO and co-founder, Dishio
I hear a version of this every week. Owners tell me marketing is a black box, and what they mean is that they can’t see inside it, so they either overspend on faith or underspend on fear. Neither one is a strategy. Chip Klose made a similar argument about running the business by the numbers in Restaurant Profitability and Growth, and it lands the same way here: what you can’t measure, you can’t manage.
Why Did a 7% Lift Across 37 Stores Feel Like a Failure?
It didn’t feel like one to the operator. That’s the whole story. A family friend asked Brett to try his e-commerce playbook on a restaurant group, and after three months across 37 stores the client came back with about a 7% lift. Brett, calibrated on 15x and 20x returns, was bracing to be fired. Instead, he says, the client was the happiest he’d ever seen him.
That gap — a number that looks small to an advertiser and enormous to an operator — is the reason Brett fired his e-commerce brands in mid-2019 and went all in on restaurants. Then 2020 arrived and he spent a while regretting it. He doesn’t anymore.
Anyone who has run a P&L knows why 7% is a big deal. It shows up in the same place a point of food cost shows up, only in the other direction, and it compounds every week you keep it. That’s the same math James Jones and I worked through on the cost side in US Foods’ Menu IQ — small percentages, applied across every store, every day.
How Many Times Does Someone Need to See Your Ad Before They Buy?
Seven or more, in Brett’s experience. Most of the “digital doesn’t work for us” stories he hears are actually frequency stories: an operator spent $500, reached a few thousand people once or twice, saw nothing, and concluded the channel is broken. It isn’t broken. It was never switched on long enough to do anything.
He also points out the thing that ought to end the billboard conversation on its own: millennials check their phones roughly 330 times a day, and Gen Z more than that. Spending $3,000 a month on a board by the highway, while the device in your guest’s pocket goes untouched, is a choice — it’s just not usually a considered one.
“You reached those people one time, maybe two times, and you say it didn’t work. You need to reach them seven-plus times to have any kind of economic impact.” — Brett Linkletter
How Does Google Connect an Ad to a Walk-In?
Through store-visit tracking, which works because Google owns both ends of the trip. Google Maps knows where the phone is, Google My Business knows where the restaurant is, and once someone views, clicks or pulls directions from an ad, Google can watch for an arrival inside roughly a seven-day window. Brett says people usually don’t believe this until he walks them through it.
That’s Google. Meta — Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp — has no equivalent, which is where the more interesting workaround comes in.
Why Is a QR Code Menu a Trojan Horse?
Because the scan is the conversion event. In e-commerce the thank-you page is what tells you the ad worked. A restaurant has no thank-you page — the transaction happens at a table. So Brett’s team uses the QR-code menu as one: someone sees an ad on Instagram, walks in, scans the code, and that scan closes the loop between the impression and the visit.
“How do we digitize the in-person physical experience? QR code menus. The moment you scan that menu, I know who you are, where you came from. That is our thank-you page.” — Brett Linkletter
The second-order effect is bigger than the tracking. Brett describes brands doing five, ten, fifteen thousand guests a month who capture nothing about any of them — people come in, they leave, and there is zero data to show for it. Put a scannable menu in front of those same guests and every month produces thousands of new data points you can build an audience from.
I know QR menus are polarizing. Plenty of operators tell me they don’t want guests on their phones at the table, and that’s a legitimate hospitality position. Worth separating the two questions, though: what the menu does to the meal, and what the scan does for your ability to ever speak to that guest again. On the full-service side Brett leans on reservations for the same purpose, since a reservation captures first-party data and confirms the arrival in one motion.
What Should the Ad Actually Ask Someone to Do?
Something specific, and something matched to how well that person already knows you. Brett’s business has one way to buy: book a call, take the call, get a price. A restaurant has walk-ins, reservations, private events, catering, a wine club, online ordering, third-party apps — he calls these the revenue channels, and each one needs its own call to action.
Which is why running a catering ad to a cold audience is a waste. As Brett puts it, you’re asking a stranger for $500 on a “trust me, bro.” Catering belongs in front of someone who has already eaten your food and liked it. Cold audiences get an introduction, warm ones get a reason to come back, loyal ones get the high-ticket ask.
And the vanity metric he wants dead: reach with nothing attached to it. “I reached a hundred thousand people.” Fine — how many of them ate? “I got a bunch of likes.” You can’t deposit likes.
Why Market to Three Visits Instead of Chasing New Guests?
Because after three purchases you’ve usually made a customer for life, and because almost every operator overestimates how often their regulars actually come back. Brett borrows the rule from Jon Taffer and builds the whole funnel around it — bounce-back offers for QSR brands, a soft second touch and then a catering or private-event ask for full service.
Three visits doesn’t mean three walk-ins. It can be a reservation, then an online order with free delivery, then a catering package — the same guest, moving across revenue channels. On our side of the point of sale I’ve seen the same pattern for years: guests who order across multiple channels are worth several times a first-time visitor, and they’re the ones worth engineering for. Guestologie’s Ryan and I got into the same territory in Turning One-Time Visits Into Loyalty, and Matt Plapp made the frequency case in Marketing and Loyalty Programs a couple of years before that.
One caution Brett offers, which I appreciated coming from someone who sells marketing: don’t live on discounts. Offers can spike a week and feel like proof, but leaning on them forever isn’t something he sees working long term.
Why Would a Marketing Agency Build Its Own Software?
Out of frustration, mostly. Brett says the tools he took for granted in e-commerce simply didn’t exist for restaurants, and his first reaction wasn’t opportunity, it was something closer to anger — how is an entire industry running without these? So the team built what they needed internally, then kept building as each fix exposed the next gap: a funnel builder to capture first-party data, then reservation integrations, then online-ordering integrations, then point-of-sale integrations to see what people actually ordered.
The org chart that came out of it: Dishio Holdings is the parent, Dishio is the software platform at dish.io, and Dineline is the agency at dineline.co. In practice they run as a tech-enabled agency — some clients use the platform as a SaaS tool with their own marketing team, but plenty want the service layer on top, and some have been with them close to ten years.
The business has been going since 2015 and was bootstrapped for eleven-plus years. In December they raised $2.5 million at a $20 million valuation, entirely from family and friends who had watched the track record build. Brett is visibly proud of both halves of that sentence.
What Does “Personalization” Actually Mean Here?
Not a first name in a subject line. Brett’s onboarding starts with about 40 questions about the business — revenue channels, ideal customer, average ticket, what you want to sell and to whom — to build what his team calls the restaurant’s brain. AI, as he says, is only as good as the data you feed it.
“Our software is like a detective. Where did they come from, did they convert, what did they look at on the digital menu, what did they actually order from the POS, and can we get first-party data too? We’re putting it all together to get a customer profile.” — Brett Linkletter
Here’s my personal version of why this matters. I don’t drink. That’s not a statement about anybody else’s choices — but I’ve been to brands ten-plus times, never once ordered alcohol, and still get the wine club, the beer club and the new cocktail. Every one of those emails teaches me to ignore the next one. The data to know better was sitting in their point of sale the whole time.
Do it right and it’s the opposite experience: you order the shrimp tacos every visit, the salmon taco launches, and that’s the email you get. And if you’ve told them about a nut allergy, the special with nuts in it never shows up in your inbox. That’s not clever marketing. That’s just paying attention at scale — and it’s the natural extension of the argument in Your Data Is Your Business’s Lifeblood: the value only exists if you own the data and act on it.
What Are the Uncashed Checks Sitting in Your POS?
Contacts you already earned and never used. Brett describes brands telling him they don’t think they even have a customer list, and then finding roughly half a million contacts once they connect the point of sale. He calls them uncashed checks, and the phrase stuck with me because it’s exactly right — that’s revenue you already did the hard work for.
He says brands they work with commonly report 15–20% growth inside the first 90 days, and his explanation isn’t magic: the lights were off, now they’re on. When you can see which channel produced which guest, the low-hanging fruit is obvious and the wasted spend stops.
Where Is This Going Next?
Somewhere I didn’t expect a marketing conversation to end up. Brett wants the digital menu to eventually tell guests where the food came from, what’s in it, whether it was cooked in seed oils — the same scrutiny people apply to eggs at the grocery store and abandon entirely at a restaurant table. He’s clear that we’re not close to that yet, and equally clear about why he cares.
He’s also honest that the industry is still catching up to the basics. Personalization is where everything is heading, and a lot of operators are still buying billboards. Both things are true at once, which is roughly what makes this business fun. Rick Rosenfield told a version of the same story about California Pizza Kitchen — the operators who move early on the thing everyone else is skeptical of tend to keep the lead.
How Do You Get Started With Dishio?
Brett’s first suggestion isn’t a sales call, which I respect: go watch the Dineline channel on YouTube, where they post roughly 32,000 subscribers’ worth of fairly detailed marketing teardowns you could act on without hiring anyone. If you want to go further, book a call — he describes it as a consultation more than a pitch, digging into your discovery channels, your revenue channels, and how to connect the two. If it’s a fit, you get a proposal.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do you track a restaurant ad to an actual visit?
Two ways, according to Brett Linkletter. On Google, store-visit tracking matches phone location data from Google Maps against your Google My Business location, typically inside a seven-day window after someone views, clicks or takes directions from an ad. On Meta, there’s no equivalent, so you create the conversion event yourself — most often a QR-code menu scan, or a reservation that confirms the guest arrived.
What is a QR code menu really for?
Data capture as much as menu display. Brett calls it a Trojan horse: the scan works like an e-commerce thank-you page, closing the loop between the ad someone saw and the visit they made. It also converts anonymous foot traffic into contactable guests — a brand serving 5,000 to 15,000 people a month otherwise ends the month knowing nothing about any of them.
How many times does a guest need to see your ad before they buy?
Seven or more, in Brett’s experience. Most “digital marketing doesn’t work” conclusions come from campaigns that reached people once or twice on a few hundred dollars. Frequency is what produces economic impact, so budget for repeated exposure to a defined audience rather than a single blast to a large one.
What kind of growth do restaurants see from tracked marketing?
Brett says brands working with his team commonly report 15–20% growth within the first 90 days, and that his very first restaurant client saw about a 7% lift across 37 stores in three months. His explanation is measurement rather than magic: once you can see which channel produced which guest, obvious opportunities surface and wasted spend stops.
Should a restaurant hire an agency or run marketing in-house?
Both work, and the honest test is whether anyone on your team will own it weekly. Dishio runs as a tech-enabled agency for exactly this reason — some clients use the software with their own marketing staff, while many want the service layer on top. Most operators didn’t get into this business to run ad campaigns, so partnering is often the faster path.
Takeaways
- Measurement comes before budget. If you can’t tie spend to visits, you’re not marketing, you’re donating.
- Create a conversion event. A QR-code menu, a reservation, an online order — something that says this guest arrived.
- Budget for seven touches, not one. A single $500 blast proves nothing except that you spent $500.
- Aim at the third visit. Across any channel. That’s where the customer-for-life math lives.
- Go find your uncashed checks. Connect the POS and see how many contacts you already own.
- Personalization means the offer fits the person. Not a first name in the subject line.
Prefer to read it? The full transcript of episode 354 is available, with speaker labels and section headings: Restaurant Marketing You Can Track — Full Transcript.
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