How to Promote your Restaurant on Talabat, and Grow your Visibility and Orders

To be competitive, restaurants and cloud kitchens doing food delivery in the MENA region know they need to use the marketing tools available on Talabat.

But what are the options when it comes to promoting a brand on Talabat? What are the different types of campaigns available, and which should you choose to meet your marketing goals?

To help food delivery marketers answer these questions, I did a deep dive into all the marketing features available in Talabat, and asked some delivery app marketing experts how they approach marketing on the platform.

We’ll cover:

• Talabat Advertising
• Talabat Promotions (aka Offers and Discounts)
• How to make your Talabat promotions more effective
• ‍The Talabat algorithm
• How to improve organic visibility

But first let's outline the big picture for promoting a brand on Talabat.

Talabat has three 'pillars' when it comes to marketing.

1. Organic visibility
2. CPC advertising
3. Offers and discounts

Full optimization of your Talabat operations and marketing means mastering and optimizing for all three pillars. Each pillar has it's own unique techniques and strategies, but one thing that is common across all of them is that success relies on data-driven decision making.

Talabat Advertising‍

Talabat Advertising, often referred to as Premium Position, is a delivery app advertising format that boosts your listing to the top positions in the app.

Talabat Premium positions are CPC ad types where the advertiser pays per click, or in the case of Talabat, per menu view.

In Talabat,
Click = Menu view‍

‍When should you use Talabat Advertising

‍Generally Talabat ads are a great choice when your goal is driving any type of direct revenue focused marketing, such as new customers and top and bottom line growth. Ads can also perform well as part of any on-going brand awareness initiatives.

As Talabat ads are a pay for performance strategy designed to get your brand seen by as many people as possible, the increased visibility will reliably convert into more orders as well.  

How start advertising on Talabat

Click “Advertising” in the Grow your Business section on the left navigation of the portal.

Here you’ll be able to select either recommended Talabat campaigns, or create your own campaign from scratch.

If you choose the default campaigns you will get the choice of two budget levels and default settings for Talabat ads.

Using the default settings your campaign will run:

• In all your delivery areas
• Target both new users and users who’ve ordered before.
• Across all your opening hours. (Algorithm optimises when to show your listing to users.)

You can also choose to create your own campaigns where you have more control over how your ads run, and Talabat offers all the basics you need to customize your campaigns based on your goals.

You can choose precisely which delivery areas you want to target, whether you want to reach new customers only, set a custom budget and even set a custom CPC bid.

Typically first time advertisers will choose the default options of Talabat, but when focusing on optimization adjusting the settings in custom campaigns can often lead to better results.

Learn more about setting budgets for delivery app marketing >>

‍
Ideas to optimize your ads using custom campaigns

‍The way to approach this is by looking at your Talabat performance data to make campaign decisions.

> Target more popular delivery areas  

Look at your ‘sales by location’ performance report. You can target your ads at delivery areas where more people tend to order and spend less in areas where demand is lower.

> Manually optimize for busy times by adjusting bids 

1. Review your ‘sales by hour’ performance report: Look at the report to identify the hours of the day when your sales are the highest.
2. Increase your bids by 10% during these peak hours: Once you've identified the most popular time window for sales, create a new campaign or adjust your existing campaign to have bids that are 10% higher than usual during those hours.
3. Launch the campaign at the start of the peak period: Start the campaign at the beginning of the identified high-sales time window.
4. Turn off the campaign when the peak period ends: After the high-sales period ends, log back in to pause or stop the campaign to prevent spending outside of the peak hours

> Automate optimization with delivery marketing software

One of the keys to unlocking growth with Talabat ads is automation.

Automation is the ability to run optimization strategies like the two above without having to do any manual work. This saves time, but it also increases the performance of campaigns substantially.

As Pierre, Head of Growth at Revly says, "Delivery app marketing software uses campaign performance data to automatically find and run the most effective ad strategies. Brands using ads automation can regularly see a 200%-300% increase in campaign performance when properly implemented."

How to get better results with Talabat ads

Talabat advertising is becoming increasingly expensive due to competition.

In response, more and more brands have become interested in the topic of optimization.

The best optimization strategies on Talabat are:

1. Targeting by hour or meal period,
2. Optimizing for delivery location
3. Optimizing for profit (if that is your goal.)

Many optimization techniques on Talabat can be achieved by downloading and processing data and updating campaigns manually in the platform. For ease of use and simplicity, many brands are considering delivery app marketing platforms as a more streamlined way to run their delivery app ads.

There are many benefits of running your Talabat ads through a marketing platform including:

• Automating bidding per hour strategies.
• Aggregating performance data across locations to see what's really working for your brands.
• Access to pre-calculated performance metrics that help with optimizing for profit.

Talabat Promotions (aka Offers and Discounting)‍

Promotions are Talabat’s discounts and offers marketing feature, which lets restaurants easily apply discounting to their menu to attract more orders and new customers.

On Talabat, Promotions remain the single most effective way to drive huge increases in revenue, however they also reduce margins substantially.

For most restaurants it is vital to understand the power of discounting and how this type of campaign fits into almost every successful food delivery operation.

Ignore discounting and you are often leaving both revenue and profit on the table when it comes to Talabat. As with all things marketing, discounting can have huge, positive impact on a food delivery business - when deployed strategically.‍

Talabat Promotions - what are your options‍

Talabat has many different discounting options, all designed to help restaurants achieve particular goals.

Broadly in Talabat you have 3 options:

1. Gems.

Gems are offers specifically targeting new users. They show in the app as a popup promoting your menu with the following fixed set of promotion options.

Promotion details:

• AED 5 off at a minimum spend of AED 20
• AED 10 off at a minimum spend of AED 30
• AED 15 off at a minimum spend of AED 50
• AED 20 off at a minimum spend of AED 70
• AED 30 off at a minimum spend of AED 100

2. Talabat Campaigns

Talabat campaigns are 50% full menu discounts run over a fixed time period of 1 week. Called Super Saver in the app this type of campaign will drive the maximum amount of orders with the largest discount applied. 

3. Discounts

Discounts are where you create your own discounting strategy including days of week you want to run offers, customer targeting, as well as controlling the use of whole menu or per item discounting. Discounts give you the most control over your discounting strategy. 

When should you use Talabat Discounting?

Like visibility CPC ads, discounting can be used effectively for almost all types of marketing goal - especially when you take a strategic approach. 

In general, offers are most effective at driving overall top line revenue, acquiring more new customers and reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC) compared to other marketing channels. 

Whilst those are the fundamentals of Talabat promotions, how an individual brand or restaurant approaches discounting should be highly specific to the brand, and planned in advance.

I recommend the following starting point to generate an appropriate discounting strategy for any given brand on Talabat.

1. Define brand positioning

Before running any campaigns assess your position in the market. Is the brand new or established in the market / delivery location, what’s the price point and target customer and how premium is the menu content in your Talabat profile? 

2. Define the maximum discount percentage that makes sense for your brand.

Discounting gives your restaurant a particular brand impression in app users' minds. The more premium the brand the less discounting you are generally willing to accept and the more tactical your approach is likely to be.

3. Define how much can you afford over a specific time period

This is often overlooked, but the best way to approach discounting campaigns is with a test and learn mentality. Set budgets upfront and for specific time periods, run the campaign, and then analyze results before making decisions about results and next steps.

Testing what discounting strategies work for your brand is the key to running a successful discounting strategy over the long term.  

How start running promotions on Talabat

Start by clicking Promotions in the Grow your Business section on the left navigation of the portal.

Here you’ll be able to select either recommended Talabat promotions, Gems or Campaigns, or create your own promotion from scratch (Discounts).

If you choose one of the default campaigns you have very little or no control over the settings. The only customization you can make is with Gems where you can set the target new customers you’d like to receive. Setting this higher will increase the discount amount applied to your gem.

Using the default promotion options, your campaign will run:

• In all your delivery areas
• Target both new users and users who’ve ordered before.
• Across all your opening hours. (Algorithm optimises when to show your listing to users.)

You can also choose to create your own promotions where you have more control over how your discount is run.

Talabat has lots of great customization options depending on your goals. These include:

1. Targeting all, new or churned customers with discounts
2. Granular settings for discount % as well as maximum discount amount and minimum order value
3. Day of the week you want to run your discount 
4. Selecting menu items or whole menu discounting
5. Choosing which brands you want your discount to apply to

How to get better results with Talabat discounting

Talabat promotions are extremely effective but can also be expensive, and if not properly optimized the campaigns can lead to lower overall net profit.

For this reason, many brands are taking an increasingly data driven approach to discounting, often focusing on profit optimization.

The best optimization strategies for discounting on Talabat are:

• Increasing sales in off peak days / hours
• Optimizing based on location
• Optimizing towards reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC)

Learn more about data driven discounting strategies here

The Talabat Algorithm 

Like all social media, ecommerce and search engines, Talabat uses a ranking algorithm to show restaurant listings to users. But why should you care?

The Talabat algorithm controls how visible you are inside the app when users search for the menu items you sell.

The basic idea behind all delivery app algorithms is to give the user the most seamless and best delivery experience possible.

This means Talabat uses app usage data to promote restaurants its users already like. In the end, increasing organic visibility is all about increasing customer satisfaction.

The result is that restaurants that are already performing highly on the app are boosted up the ranking.

What does highly performing mean?

High performance is a collection of in-app metrics that combine to give an overall score that determines how visible a listing is for any search.

How to Improve Organic Visibility

Improving your Talabat organic visibility is all about tracking and improving the key metrics that define success on the app.

An easy way to get started with Talabat algorithm optimization is to look at the Performance tab of the Talabat portal - especially the operations section. 

Alternatively, specialized tools for tracking delivery app performance metrics can help streamline this, and make it a lot easier to find and address issues, as well as see performance over time.

Delivery app visibility metrics to look out for:

Gross Revenue: This is calculated by multiplying the total number of completed orders in a given time period by the average basket size.

Talabat uses this metric to highlight restaurants that generate the most orders and revenue, showcasing them more prominently to users.‍

Order Rejections: This measures the percentage of orders rejected by the restaurant out of the total orders received. High rejection rates can negatively impact user experience and, consequently, reduce the visibility of the restaurant’s listing on the platform.‍

Offline Time: This refers to the amount of time the restaurant is marked as offline during its official opening hours. Restaurants that are online and active more consistently are ranked higher.‍

Orders with Customer Complaints: This is the percentage of orders that receive customer complaints relative to the total number of orders. A higher rate of complaints typically indicates a decline in customer experience and can affect visibility on the app. Keep the complaints low.‍

Order Delays and Preparation Time: This metric tracks the number of orders delayed in leaving the restaurant. Frequent delays can lead to lower customer satisfaction and impact the restaurant’s ranking.‍

Customer Ratings: This is the average star rating out of 5 that customers give for their delivery experience. High ratings are a key indicator of customer satisfaction and can enhance the restaurant’s visibility on the app.

It’s important to remember that metrics used by algorithms aren’t static. For example, rather than relying on a fixed, all-time average of ratings, an algorithm might use a rolling average that updates weekly.

This means that if a product or service receives poor ratings in the past, it has the opportunity to recover and improve its visibility over time as recent ratings are factored in.

As a food delivery operator one of the key marketing strategies on Talabat is keeping these performance metrics healthy.

Learn more about delivery app marketing metrics >>>

Wrapping it up

Organic visibility optimization, advertising and discounts are the three main ways to promote your restaurant in Talabat.

Putting data at the heart of your approach to marketing on Talabat is the basis for running campaigns that consistently meet your goals.

For many, adding in specialized marketing software on top of the Talabat marketing platform is the best way to grow revenue and profit on delivery apps.