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Zomato publishes the terms for every ad product it sells. Read them and the dashboard stops being a black box.
11 Nov 2026 · 9 min read
The short answer
Zomato ads are paid placements you buy by signing a Sponsored Listing Service Request Form, and depending on the product Zomato charges per visit or click, per impression, or a percentage of sales. Under its published terms Zomato decides where the ad appears and, for most products, does not guarantee any number of clicks, and on the statements we reconcile 18% GST is added to every ad deduction. The ROI Zomato reports is the order value it links to your ads divided by what you spent, which is not the same as the extra orders the ads brought in.
Zomato does not sell one thing called ads. Its policy pages list more than twenty ad products, from search placements to festive packs, and each has its own terms. You buy one by signing a Sponsored Listing Service Request Form. The form sets the price, the budget and the dates, and the published terms set the rules around them. The visit, click and impression terms let Zomato decide the size, placement and position of the ad, and most of the terms say it does not guarantee a minimum number of clicks or impressions. So you are buying a chance to be seen, at a price, not a number of orders.
Visit Pack and Visit Pack Plus charge per visit or per click to your restaurant page, up to the number of visits or the budget in your form. Branding on Search, Impression Pack and Zomato Plus Ads charge per impression, each time a customer sees the ad, whether or not they open your page. Zomato Plus Ads appear on the rider tracking screen after a customer has ordered. Guaranteed ROI and Extra Inventory charge a percentage of the order value linked to the ad. Grow Max, which account managers call Grow Maxx, charges a percentage of your net sales written into the form, and Zomato's terms say it must keep the spend under that limit. Ask which model you are on before you sign, because it decides what you are paying for.
The four ways Zomato charges for ads
Visit Pack · Visit Pack Plus
Per visit or click
A visit counts if the customer opens your page by tapping the ad, or within 24 hours of last seeing it
Branding on Search · Impression Pack · Zomato Plus Ads
Per impression
You pay each time a customer sees the ad, whether or not they open your page
Guaranteed ROI · Extra Inventory
A share of ad sales
The fee is a percentage of the order value Zomato links to the ad
Grow Max
A share of net sales, capped
The percentage is written into your form; Zomato must keep spend under that limit
This is the line most owners never read. Under the Visit Pack and Visit Pack Plus terms, a visit or click counts when a customer opens your restaurant page by tapping the ad, or opens it any time within 24 hours of last seeing the ad. So a customer who scrolls past your ad, then searches for you by name an hour later, counts as a paid visit. The Visit Pack terms add that if Zomato under-delivers visits on a day, it can deliver up to five times the daily visits in the following days until the total is met. Zomato's terms also let it give a daily discount on the cost per click, at its own discretion.
The Visit Pack and impression-ad terms say the fee is exclusive of taxes, and on the statements we reconcile, 18% GST is added to each ad deduction. So a ₹10,000 ad budget costs ₹11,800 in cash. The Visit Pack Plus, Grow Max and Guaranteed ROI terms settle the fee by deducting it from your weekly payout, shown as its own line on your statement, and the Visit Pack Plus terms say you are not charged more than the agreed campaign budget. Grow Max is invoiced monthly and either side can end it with 15 days' notice. On the five outlets we manage, the visit campaigns in October 2026 were priced at ₹16 to ₹17 a visit, and on the statements we reconcile, Zomato ad charges come off the weekly payout.
Grow Maxx is the one Zomato ad you buy as a percentage, not a budget. Your click campaigns, which Zomato calls BAU, keep running, and Grow Maxx runs alongside them as a backup. In practice you don't pick the percentage. Zomato offers it from its own calculator. On our accounts it has started from recent ad spend as a share of sales: in April 2026 our outlets were offered their March share, 10.43% at one outlet. Our account manager told us the calculator also weighs the sales forecast and last year's festive peaks. Zomato does not publish the method, so treat the figure as an offer. In April 2026 we asked for a suggested 11.65% to come down below 10%. Account managers pitch three models. Model 1 fixes ads at a share of sales. Your clicks spend first, and once they run out Grow Maxx tops the month's ad bill up to the agreed percentage of your total order value. If the clicks already cost that much, it bills nothing. In the example account managers use, a ₹15,000 click budget at 10% bills nothing extra on ₹1,50,000 of sales and ₹1,500 extra on ₹1,65,000. Model 2 fixes the return. Zomato sets a baseline order value from your trend and forecast busy days, and you pay one percentage up to it and a higher one on every rupee above it. Account managers pitch it as the most aggressive ad product Zomato has. In their example, with 10% below a ₹1,50,000 baseline and 20% above it, ad spend reaches 12.9% of sales at 40% growth. Model 3 is the newest. Our account manager described it in October 2026 as a single percentage set one to two points above your usual ad share. We have not seen it in writing.
We checked Zomato's October 2026 campaign report for the five outlets we manage, all on a 10% Model 1, against their Zomato sales for 1 to 26 October. The rule held on every one. On the three outlets where clicks already cost 10.5% to 11.2% of sales, Grow Maxx billed nothing. On the two where clicks cost 7.2% and 7.6%, it billed ₹5,502 and ₹28,212, which took total ads to about 10% of sales. Two lessons follow. Size the click budget below the Grow Maxx percentage, with room for a slow month, because a click budget that crosses the line switches Grow Maxx off. And look for Grow Maxx in the campaign report from the Ads section of the partner dashboard, because the weekly settlement folds it into one ads deduction. Click campaigns can also be targeted. The preferred segment pack, which appears as its own product in the same report, sends paid clicks to the customer segments Zomato rates most valuable first and passes any left over to other customers.
Zomato's terms define ROI as the order value it links to your ads divided by your ad spend. That order value is item value plus packaging minus the discounts you fund, and the spend is before GST. It is a measure of orders the ad touched, not orders the ad created. On the five outlets we manage, the platforms credited ads with 74% to 85% of all orders in September 2026. In Zomato's own campaign report for 1 to 26 October 2026 on the same outlets, about one in nine ad visits became an order, the visit campaigns returned ₹5.0 of ad-linked sales per rupee and Grow Max lifted the blended figure to ₹7.6. Grow Max was 12.4% of the spend but 42.8% of the ad-linked sales, and on three of the five outlets it showed orders with nothing billed that month.
Swiggy does not publish terms for its ad products. On the statements we reconcile, ads appear as Growth Investment In Ads with 18% GST. Its two everyday products are CPC, where you pay for each click to your menu, and CBA, which Swiggy's account managers describe as search-based ads. With search ads you add keywords to your search keyword list, such as dish names or what people type when they look for your cuisine, and they are not charged one by one: the spend comes out of the CBA budget. In October 2026, across the same five outlets, CPC returned ₹5.3 of ad-linked sales per rupee and CBA returned ₹16.8, on under a fifth of the spend. Search ads reach people already looking for what you sell, so returns run higher, but there is only so much search to buy. For festivals we also add booster budgets for a set window on top of the month's budget, and the account manager paces them across the days.
Fix the listing first: the ad sends people to your page, and the photos, rating, delivery time and first three dishes decide whether they order. Set a ceiling before a target. Our working rule is ad spend at or under about a tenth of the delivery revenue the platform brings in, remembering the GST on top. Concentrate spend in the hours your kitchen is ready. Ask your account manager which product and pricing model each campaign is on, and get the form in writing. Then judge the ads on your total orders and take-home with the ads running against a period with them paused, not on the ROI figure alone.
This is the kind of work we run end to end as a Swiggy and Zomato agency for Mumbai restaurants.
Photo © ChakraHave us run it
On a plan, the same person at Nlyten runs your Swiggy and Zomato week to week: ads, offers, menu and payouts, with one set of numbers everyone trusts.
FAQ
Zomato does not publish a price list. The rate is set in the Sponsored Listing Service Request Form you sign, per visit, per click, per impression or as a percentage of sales, and 18% GST is added on top. On the five outlets we manage, visit campaigns in October 2026 were priced at ₹16 to ₹17 a visit.
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