Shake Shack has seen positive same-store sales growth for several quarters, but its underinvestment in promoting in comparison with larger fast-food and fast-casual peers prevented the burger chain from realizing its “true potential,” in line with CEO Rob Lynch.
“This brand has never had top-of-funnel paid media launched at scale,” Lynch said on the corporate’s most up-to-date earnings call. “It’s hard to consider, but all of the marketing has at all times been word of mouth, earned media and bottom-funnel … promo activations, and so we leaned in on making a few of these investments and so we’re ecstatic with the outcomes.”
Helping to supercharge the paid media investment is a partnership with Google. By using the tech giant’s Web To App Connect offering, artificial intelligence-powered search optimization and Performance Max ad products, Shake Shack has driven a sixfold increase in app conversions and a 2.5x improvement in return on ad spend. The improved performance speaks to how the chain is taking advantage of its app and turning it right into a driver of long-term growth.
“We were investing lots more in media to drive app downloads, to drive users back into the app,” said Lisa Whittaker, Shake Shack’s senior director of digital marketing. “As we proceed to take a position more, how will we be sure that we’re spending money on quality traffic? How will we be certain that that we’re not only wasting money, that we’re dropping them into the very best experience possible inside our app?”
Push to the app
Shake Shack, which was officially founded in 2004 after several years as a hot dog cart in New York, launched its mobile app nationally in 2017. Such offerings have develop into increasingly crucial tools for restaurants as a consequence of the pandemic-accelerated shift toward digital and mobile channels and as first-party customer data becomes more helpful to marketers.
For Shake Shack, adding value and advantages to the app is an extension of its approach to on-premise hospitality. App users get access to limited-time offers 4 days ahead of most people, amongst other features. To showcase the investment within the app experience, the chain desired to remove the friction between mobile web traffic and app conversion.
“We’ve seen the behavior when guests download our app and open it up, that conversion behavior is pretty significant for us. We know that [when] guests are downloading our app, they’re expecting additional value advantages,” Whittaker said.
Google’s Web to App Connect tool made “perfect sense” for Shake Shack. Mobile users who have already got the Shake Shack app downloaded and click on paid ads are connected to relevant app pages, similar to offers and in-app challenges, giving them access to a more personalized experience.
“We have seen the extra value of when anyone is an app user versus when they only go to our website. The app provides us an extra communication touch point to actually be sure that we’re driving awareness around a few of the key features or offers that that we’re doing throughout the app,” Whittaker said.
Shake Shack has used special offers to drive each app downloads and same-store sales. In May, the chain ran a month-long promotion around National Burger Month that, coupled with a $1 soda promotion, helped drive a 20% app install increase. Similarly, Shake Shack has seen a 16% month-over-month increase in monthly energetic users when executing such offers through the app, Whittaker said.
“All the really necessary life cycle marketing metrics we have a look at, all the information, has been extremely positive,” she said.
Moving forward
Shake Shack says its efforts to show web users into app users has been boosted not only by Google’s Web To App Connect tool but additionally by the tech giant’s AI-powered search optimization and Performance Max ad products. While the chain has seen positive results from its experiments, other marketers have expressed concern with the black box nature of those tools.
“It’s a journey to get comfortable with the ‘uncomfortableness’ and have a few of that lack of control and less visibility. As digital marketers, we’re going to must figure it out,” Whittaker said. “Everybody is scrambling immediately since the technology is moving so fast.”
For Whittaker, that discomfort is eased by a very good relationship with Google’s ad team, which she feels is invested of their business, in addition to the flexibility to leverage numerous data quickly due to AI. That said, using the tools is a relentless learning process.
“The leads to the information don’t lie, so if there’s something funky occurring with AI, it’s going to indicate up in some unspecified time in the future,” she said.
The use of those tools comes as Shake Shack executives have made a commitment to ramping up ad spend, especially from an upper-funnel perspective. Digital ad spend allows the chain to raised service a store footprint that extends beyond high-traffic areas like New York and Los Angeles into 51 other markets across the U.S. Early investment is already yielding gains.
“We’re getting numerous different halo advantages from the media itself, outside of driving traffic and sales, which is the primary goal,” Whittaker said. “I’m so excited for all of the learnings that we’re getting, because this is actually going to tell our model going into 2026.”
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