Programmatic SEO for restaurants: a 90-day teardown

Every SMB I've worked with thinks they have a ROAS problem. They don't. They have a measurement problem dressed up as a ROAS problem.

The dashboard says 4.2× and the bank account says payroll is tight. How does that math work? It works because the dashboard is lying — not maliciously, just inevitably.

1. What the platform calls revenue

Meta and Google count revenue the way casinos count chips — generously, and in their favor. The conversion they attribute to your ad is often a customer who would have bought anyway, in the second-touch column, in last-click universe.

2. The four metrics that don't lie

We replaced ROAS with a stack of four. Each one is harder to game and easier to act on:

• Net new customer acquisition cost (NCAC)
• Booked-revenue payback period
• First-90-day LTV by source
• Cost per qualified lead — defined by sales, not marketing

(continued — real post is ~2000 words)