Do your Swiggy and Zomato ads pay for themselves? How to read the numbers
· 7 min read
Ads on Swiggy and Zomato put a restaurant in front of customers at the moment they are choosing what to eat. Both platforms report how the campaigns did in their business metrics, and three numbers from those reports are enough to decide whether the budget is the right size.
Ads depth: how much of the business came through ads
Ads depth is the share of your sales that came from ads. Work it out against gross sales — sales plus the discount you funded — so it is not flattered or diluted by how much you discounted:
- Swiggy: (CPC sales + CBA sales) ÷ gross sales, where gross sales is net sales plus the restaurant-funded discount.
- Zomato: sales from ads ÷ (sales + discount given).
Swiggy publishes a depth for each of its two ad products. Adding the two percentages would add shares of different bases, so work the combined figure out from the rupees instead.
Return on ad spend
Return on ad spend is the sales from ads divided by what the ads cost. Zomato states it as a multiple. Swiggy's own figure covers CPC only and is shown as a percentage, so for both products together, divide the sales from both by the spend on both.
A sample week
| Figure | Value |
|---|---|
| Ad spend | ₹12,000 |
| Sales from ads | ₹54,000 |
| Sales | ₹1,80,000 |
| Discount given | ₹20,000 |
| Gross sales | ₹2,00,000 |
| Ads depth | 27.0% |
| Return on ad spend | 4.5× |
The return you need, for your margins
A return of 4.5× is sales, not profit. Whether it pays depends on what a rupee of sales leaves you after platform fees, discounts and the food itself. If that is 25 paise, the ads pay for themselves at 4× and above — and at 4.5×, ₹54,000 of ad sales leaves about ₹13,500 against ₹12,000 of spend.
Break-even return on ad spend = 1 ÷ what a rupee of sales leaves after fees, discounts and food
Two things are worth keeping in mind. Some customers who came through an ad would have ordered anyway, and some who found you through one come back without it. Neither shows in a single week, which is why the trend over several weeks matters more than any one figure.
Where the spend appears in the payout
Ad campaigns are billed against the settlement period rather than against individual orders, so the spend appears after the net payout on orders. Reading the month from gross sales to the money received after advertising is the clearest way to see what the ads cost alongside everything else.
Setting a limit you can watch
Once you know the share of gross sales your margins allow for advertising, write it down. A limit you check every week is easier to keep to than a budget you review at the end of the month.
MenuMetrics reads both platforms' business metrics into one view — ad spend, sales from ads, ads depth and return on ad spend — and Trends marks any week where advertising runs over the share you set.
Reconcile every payout, not a sample
MenuMetricsreads the Swiggy and Zomato reports you already download and checks every order against what settled. Start with last month’s file.