How to Optimize Food Delivery App Ads for Peak Meal Periods

‍Meal period targeting is one of the most effective ad strategies on food delivery platforms for restaurants.

The general approach is simple:

• Analyze your orders and revenue on an hourly basis.
• Increase your bids and budgets during these peak hours.

If your ads aren't optimized for your unique peak hours, you're missing out on revenue.

The reason is also simple: if you're spending budget to be visible when customers are less likely to order, then some portion of your spend is unnecessarily wasted.

Effective meal-period targeting boosts your visibility, increases clicks, and maximizes your returns.

In this guide, you'll learn:

• How to identify your busiest hours on Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem and Noon
• How to run ads specifically for these peak periods on each platform
• How to avoid costly mistakes

Let’s get started.

(Note that this article is aimed at restaurants operating in the UAE but the process is applicable broadly.)

How to Identify Your Peak Meal Periods

Identifying your peak meal periods is the first step for optimizing your ads.

You need two simple metrics:

• Orders per hour
• Revenue per hour

Usually these two metrics will have the same overall trend. The reason we look at both is find where they differ.

For example if you're average order value is higher on the weekend but with the same number of orders, then you already pin pointed an opportunity.

Most likely you already have sense of what your peak times are - breakfast, lunch, dinner etc. 

But understanding real results by the hour will give you confidence in your optimization strategy and generally leads to better results.

How to find restaurant performance by the hour

You want to approach finding your hourly performance on each aggregator - not just an average of total orders so you can customize your targeting on each platform.

Talabat

Talabat gives restaurants the data in an easy to understand way. Navigate to the "performance" tab and find the sales by hour report.

Here you'll be able to see revenue by hour across the week. Note you cannot see orders unfortunately. 

(If you run multiple brands and or locations check to see which ones are selected from the dropdown at the top.

Learn more about marketing your restaurant on Talabat

Deliveroo

On Deliveroo, it's much more challenging to get the data you need to understand performance by the hour.

Go to the "Orders report", choose a weekly time period and download the report. Here you'll have to manually process the data to find your orders per hour.

Note that by default the report will pull data from all your brands and locations. 

Noon

On Noon data is limited and you cannot easily see hourly performance. However they do provide a useful chart that shows you meal periods as an average.

This is not ideal as you cannot understand the different trends between weekdays and weekends for example. 

Getting meal period data the easy way

There are also options that combine all your delivery data into a single platform to make it much easier to understand your performance.

Delivery operators using Revly for example can access hourly performance data for both orders and revenue in a single easy to understand and visually consistent format.

Let's take a look at an example using the most common data challenge with Deliveroo.

Earlier we saw the need to download multiple reports in the platform then manually process them.

With Revly's Deliveroo ads creation tool you get all this data automatically, without lifting a finger.

The shows you your exact performance by the hour for every day of the week on Deliveroo.

Using this data we can see in seconds:

• The weekend between 10am - 12pm has the highest order volume.
• 10-12pm has higher volume throughout the week compared to other times
• Tuesday and Wednesday late night are also hotspots for this brand.

Spikes usually correspond to standard meal periods—like lunch (12 pm to 2 pm) and dinner (6 pm to 9 pm)—but your restaurant may have unique patterns - as we have seen clearly in the example above.

Find peak hours for new restaurants

If you operation is just launching you have two options:

1. Start with un-optimized targeting, collect data to show patterns and then come back and optimize.
2. Make an educated guess when your peak hours might be and build initial campaigns around this schedule. 

Strategic Ad Optimization for Peak Periods

Now comes the fun part. Optimizing your ads for meal period targeting. 

Peak hours targeting is a simple but powerful strategy that can be hard to execute.

In general the strategy is a follows:

Increase CPC bids and budget during peak meal times to capture more customers when they are most likely to order from your menu.

Note: some people often get this backwards and think bids should be increased outside to peak hours to increase orders when there are less people ordering.
This almost always the incorrect approach and will result in wasted budget and overall lower performance.

If your goal is to increase orders from non-peak hours then using hourly targeted discounts is usually the way to go.

Ok so now we know the strategy let's see how do we implement it on delivery platforms.

Peak hour targeting on Talabat

In the campaign setup in the Talabat advertising panel you'll see there is no obvious way to setup CPC ads to run at particular times of the day.

This means on Talabat, the process is 100% manual and requires you to turn campaigns on and off during your peak meal periods.

It's simple, but very time consuming and not a realistic approach for most businesses.

Peak hour targeting on Talabat with Revly

Revly solves this common limitation on Talabat by enabling bid adjustments per hour.

When you create a CPC campaign in Revly on Talabat you have a lot more control over the campaign and how it spends your budget.

• You can increase bids for just certain days of the week.
• Or you can also increase bids during pre-defined meal periods.

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When you adjust bidding hourly for your CPC campaigns, Revly automatically works in the background to adjust the amount your bid at certain times of the day, therefore spending more of your budget during your peak hours.

Implementing this approach can often increase your CPC ad ROAS by 100% or 200% depending on your brands size and current marketing strategy.

Peak hour targeting on Deliveroo

Deliveroo has some great in-built tools to start executing your meal period targeting campaigns.

During the CPC ad campaign setup you will have an option to adjust bids manually.

Here you will be able to do what is called "boosting".

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In hourly boost you can tell Deliveroo to increase the bid during meal periods you specify.

This is great but does come with some limitations. For example you cannot set bids by day and by hour.

Peak hour targeting on Deliveroo with Revly

On Deliveroo, Revly gives you complete control over when your ads run.

You can still use the Deliveroo features outlined above however if you use Revly you can easily schedule your ads to run only during your peak meal periods and control which days of the week you want the campaign to show.

In this example you can see the orange outlines showing you when your ads will show on Deliveroo.

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Common Challenges in Peak-period Optimization and How to Overcome Them

Optimizing for peak hours sounds simple — but execution often breaks down.

Here are the biggest challenges we notice restaurants face. In general as your business scales these challenges become greater. 

1. Overbidding during busy periods

When everyone targets lunch or dinner, CPC prices rise fast. This eats into your margins if you're not monitoring spend vs. return.
👉 Use ROAS or contribution margin as your north star, not just clicks.

2. Poor budget distribution

Many restaurants set one flat daily budget across all hours. This means you're burning money during slow periods.
👉 Shift budget to hours where orders and revenue per hour are highest.

3. Saturation on major platforms

On Talabat, ad competition during lunch and dinner is intense. Your ads can get buried — even with high bids.
👉 Differentiate by narrowing your target: geo-location on Talabat, meal types, or high-performing branches.

4. Misalignment with operations

Your kitchen may be full — but ads are still running. This leads to long prep times, late orders, and poor customer reviews.
👉 Always sync marketing campaigns with kitchen capacity and staffing.

5. Stale campaign settings

Many brands “set and forget” their campaigns. But peak hours shift with seasons, events, or even Ramadan.
👉 Use real-time dashboards to track shifts in behavior and update ad settings weekly.

With tight execution and continuous refinement, this is one of the highest-ROI levers on delivery app marketing. 

Real-Life Example: Peak Meal-period Advertising Success

One restaurant that saw major improvement by switching to hour-based targeting was a mid-sized burger chain based in Dubai.

For months, they had been running ads on Talabat and Deliveroo using a flat daily budget from 10 AM to midnight. No hour-level targeting. No time-based bidding.
Their ads were live all day, even during slow periods like mid-afternoon or late at night.

When they reviewed their performance data using a dashboard tool, they noticed two clear spikes in both orders and revenue:

• 12 PM–2 PM (lunch)
• 7 PM–9 PM (dinner)

But their ad budget was being spent evenly across the day, meaning most of their spend was being wasted in low-intent hours.

After switching to hour-level targeting, they restructured their campaigns to spend 80% of their daily budget during those peak hours only.
They also decreased bids by 50% during non-peak windows to avoid cannibalizing spend.

The results were immediate.

• Click-through rate nearly doubled.
• ROAS improved by 38%.
• Revenue from delivery app ads went up 42% in just two weeks.

Their team now reviews hourly trends every month and updates time slots accordingly.

A simple change—but one that transformed the performance of their delivery ads.

Conclusion

If you're running delivery app ads without meal-period targeting, you're leaving money on the table.

Your customers don’t order evenly throughout the day—so your ad spend shouldn’t be evenly distributed either.

By identifying your peak hours and adjusting your campaigns accordingly, you can dramatically improve ROAS, visibility, and order volume.

It’s not about spending more. It’s about spending smarter.

Use your data. Set your peak hours. Optimize across Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem, and Noon.

Then track performance and keep refining.

Simple changes, big impact.

Start today.

Speak to Revly about running high performance marketing campaigns on delivery apps.