Insights
The mistake is rarely spending too little. It's spending with no ceiling and no idea what the channel can carry.
There is no single right ad budget, but there is a discipline. As a working rule, ad spend should sit at or below roughly a tenth of the delivery revenue those platforms generate for you, with discounts held to a similar ceiling. Together with commission and taxes, that keeps enough of every order landing in your bank to make the channel worth running. Set the cap first, then judge everything against take-home rather than the dashboard's return figure.
Ad spend should sit at or below roughly a tenth of the delivery revenue the platforms generate, with discounts held to a similar ceiling. Together with commission and taxes, that keeps enough of every order in your bank to make the channel worth running.
On accounts we have taken over, ads were quietly funding more than half of all orders. A high return figure looks reassuring until you realise the listing has stopped pulling its own weight, and the day you pause the ads the orders vanish. Healthy accounts use ads to accelerate, not to prop up.
Add commission, ad spend, discounts, and platform fees together and see what is left. When ad load creeps past the cap, take-home slides into the low fifties and below, and at that point you are buying volume you would be more profitable without.
This is the kind of work we run end to end for restaurants in Mumbai. See how our Aggregator Growth engagement works.
FAQ
As a working ceiling, keep ad spend at or under about a tenth of the delivery revenue those platforms generate, and hold discounts to a similar cap. Anything above that needs a specific reason, because it eats into take-home.
A 30-minute call is enough to know whether we can help. If we can't, we'll say so.