Food Delivery App Search Ads: Keyword Strategy Guide for Restaurants
You can now run Google-style search ads right inside UAE's food delivery apps. The aggregators currently supporting this feature are Noon Food and Talabat.
This new campaign type is not the usual "pay to be at the top", premium position campaigns most restaurants are familiar with, but actual keyword bidding.
Think about that for a second.
Someone opens Talabat, types "chicken shawarma," and boom your restaurant can show up first, even if you're not the highest-rated or closest option. It's basically hijacking search intent, and it's extremely powerful.
Pay for visibility only when someone searches for exactly what you sell.
Up to 30% of all orders start with the search bar - so this is a big change and opportunity for restaurants.
Why this changes the delivery app marketing formula
Premium positioning CPC has always been the go-to move. You pay, you get impressions, customers see your menu and you drive more revenue.
But here's the reality about traditional delivery app CPC campaigns. You're essentially buying a billboard on a highway. Everyone sees it, but most aren't interested. Your ROAS gets diluted as you scale because you're reaching people who were never hungry for what you're selling.
Search ads flip the script entirely. Lower reach for sure. But the people clicking? They're already hunting for specific dishes. They've got their wallets out, metaphorically speaking. These campaigns let you target by menu items, competitor names and the conversion rates can hit 2X what you'd see with premium spots.
At Revly, we often see a ROAS of 10X from search ad campaigns, compared to 3-5X from premium position. That's up to twice as efficient use of marketing spend and much better marketing metrics.
The trick isn't choosing one or the other. It's knowing how to optimize search ads to reduce your ad cost and increase you revenue overall.
The framework for search ads on delivery apps
Overall we recommend this general framework when starting with delivery app search ads.
- Follow the keyword strategy process in this post
- Launch your first campaigns
- Collect data for two weeks
- Analyze your results and make optimizations
Compare your search ad performance against premium positioning. You'll probably find search delivers better ROAS on a smaller scale, while premium gives you volume. That's fine, you need both, just in different proportions depending on your margins and capacity.
Search ads are not a set it and forget it campaign type. Users search behaviour changes with the seasons so you want to think about bidding up menu items that increaase in sales volume depending on the season. The competitive landscape can also change rapidly, which may force a change in keyword strategy.
Update your processes for the search ads world
Food delivery advertising used to be pretty one-dimensional. Pay for placement, optimize where you can by delivery area and meal period and go from there. These search features change the equation completely. You can actually capture people based on what they're craving right now, not just who happens to scroll past your logo.
In fact delivery app marketing has now developed into a full funnel marketing landscape with campaign types for all parts of the buyer journey. Smart operators understand this and use campaigns at all stages of funnel to drive growth that aligns with their unique business requirements.
Today, delivery app marketing is more data driven and more like a puzzle than ever before.
This is why Revly exists - to help restaurants use performance data to understand all the parts of the funnel and take high conviction marketing bets that get results faster.
To learn more about full funnel marketing, download our guide about getting maximum visibility on delivery apps.
How to optimize search ads on delivery apps
The most important thing to understand about search ads is that simply using default options given by the delivery app is almost never the best way to setup your campaigns.
Search ads on delivery apps need a custom set up to perform at their highest.
In our experience there are four general optimization strategies you need to implement to get better performance from search ads.
The four key search ads optimization strategies on delivery apps
- Turn highest performing menu items into generic keywords.
- Add the correct competitors as keywords
- Optimize the suggested keyword list
- Bid on your own brand, (if you need to)
Turn your menu winners Into keywords
The best way to start a delivery app keyword strategy is to start with data, not hunches. Start by finding your bestseller items on each delivery app from the last couple months and look for what is selling the most per app.
You want to base your keywords on these menu items.
Now here's where people can make mistakes, they add the exact menu item name as their keyword. To give you a representative example. If your "Spicy Chicken Tikka Masala Deluxe" is a best seller, your keywords should be variations like "chicken tikka," "tikka masala,". Basically you want to make generic versions of best sellers and leave out Spicy and Deluxe.
Your sales history is a cheat sheet for search ads, so use it.
Similarly, you don't necessarily want to add keywords that are too generic. In this case, it might seem obvious to add a keyword like "Indian Food" but overly general keywords tend to perform less well. For those with deep pockets, or new businesses trying to capture market share, it can make sense to bid on these keywords, but be prepared for higher overall marketing costs.
Steal traffic from your competition
This one feels a bit cheeky, and if you're not used to common practices in search marketing it can seem wrong, but the reality is - it works.
Add your competitors as keywords.
Most people executing this strategy just guess at some of their competitors but this is not the best approach.
To get this right, use Revly's competitor analysis tool (or something similar) and find every restaurant in your delivery zone in the same cuisine types. Filter by reviews and make a list of any vendor with 500+ reviews. They've already built brand awareness, so it means these names are the ones most likely being searched. Now when someone searches for them, you've popped up as an alternative.
This is the best way to cover as much of the competiitve landscape as possible.
Optimize the suggested keyword list
Noon Food and Talabat will throw keyword suggestions at you. During the campaign creation process you will get a bunch a suggested keywords. On Talabat for example its ninety options.
But don't just add them all. This will lead to sub-optimal results.
The platform doesn't really know your restaurant. It's guessing based on category tags and possibly some menu scraping. You'll get suggestions that are technically related but often don't make sense.
Running a coffee bean store, it might suggest things like latte when in fact you don't even have this on the menu. Bidding on this is a waste of money even though it's in the same ball park.
The optimization is simple - go through the list simply remove what doesn't make sense - be as ruthless as possible and keep what fits. Twenty focused, relevant keywords beat ninety mediocre ones.
Defend your own territory
The last strategy is to add your restaurant name as a keyword in order to defend your own brand.
Sounds weird, why bid on yourself? Because if you don't, your competitors will, and they'll show up when people search specifically for you and capture some of your branded search traffic. Imagine someone looking for your shawarma spot by name and finding your rival's ad instead.
Protect your brand terms if you see your competitors are actively bidding against you.
Keyword level optimization - going deep into search ads
Noon Food gets really interesting because it's the only platform where you can see exactly how each keyword performs and adjust your bids accordingly. We're talking granular control that most restaurant owners aren't even aware exists.
Here's an example of Noon Ads account for a hypothetical pizza restaurant.
Looking at the data we can immediately see the difference in ROAS between individual keywords.
Some keywords are absolute money printers. "Pepperoni pizza" is giving 9.3X ROAS and "Quattro Formaggi" is at 9.4X. Whilst others are much lower. The very generic "pizza" is only 3.1X and New York Style is performing very poorly with just 0.6X.
Now you can consider opitmization strategies for each keyword. For example.
- Increase bids in highest performing keywords to push as much volume as possible
- Consider new keyword variations that are similar. In this case maybe "Meat feast"
- Pause new york style keyword - as its not performing well.
The beauty of Noon's keyword reporting is you can spot these patterns fast. "Pizza Hut" (your competitor's name) drove 122 orders and nearly AED 12,400 in revenue. That's your whale keyword. In this case competitor bidding has resulted in a very high ROAS and high order volume. Doubling down on competitor bidding might be the best approach for this venue.
Check your new vs. returning customer split too. "Vegetarian pizza" brought in 6 new customers but 10 returning ones. This keyword is pulling double duty, both for acquisition and retention. Meanwhile "quattro formaggi" skews heavily toward new customers (5 new, 2 returning). Different keywords attract different behaviors. Adjust your strategy accordingly.
The restaurants winning on Noon are treating this like a stock portfolio. They're constantly rebalancing, pushing budget toward high-performers, cutting or reducing losers, and testing new keywords in small batches.
The fastest way to run optimized search ads using Revly
How do we know what works on with search ads on delivery apps and can share all the insights with you in this post? It's because we've run hundreds of campaigns through our delivery app marketing software.
Revly aggregates campaign data, surfaces more metrics than you normally get natively in each ad platform, and allows to make faster changes to campaigns. This drastically reduces experimentation time and removes hours manual work.
Using this tool combined with the above methodology we've been able to drive massive ROI for many of the UAE's largest delivery brands.
Keen to learn more? Please reach out to us here for a 30 mins demo.
