Are your food aggregator ads actually paying off?

Food aggregators make it very easy to spend money on ads, and comparatively hard to tell if that money did anything. You get a dashboard with impressions and clicks — vanity metrics that say nothing about whether an order actually happened, or whether that order was profitable after commission and discounts.

The number that actually matters is simple: for every rupee spent on ads, how many rupees came back in orders that wouldn't have happened otherwise? That's your real return on ad spend (ROAS), and it needs to be measured against orders — not clicks, not impressions, not 'reach'.

Most restaurant owners increase their ad budget because a food aggregator account manager recommended it, not because they've seen the order-level data proving it worked last month. That's a reasonable thing to do once. It's a risky habit to repeat every month without checking.

The comparison that matters is ad spend against incremental orders during the same window, adjusted for baseline orders you'd have gotten anyway. Without that adjustment, it's easy to credit ads for orders that were always going to happen.

Once you have that number for each food aggregator, ad budget decisions stop being a guess — you can double down on the food aggregator where ads are working, and pull back where they aren't.