How to Rank Higher on UAE's Food Delivery Apps - and Get More Orders

Key takeaways

1. Food delivery platforms have paid ad features you must use to rank highly.
2. Organic ranking algorithms use personalization heavily to show relevant results.
3. Low order error rates, good delivery times, overall popularity and ratings are the main factors in how to rank organically in delivery apps.
4. Optimizing key parts of your profile like tags and headline helps with getting more menu views.
5. Optimizing for organic ranking will also increase the effectiveness of your paid visibility campaigns.

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In the UAE, understanding how to rank high on delivery apps is an essential part of food delivery marketing.

Ranking high on delivery apps requires an understanding of the algorithms food delivery apps use to rank listings. However, to consistently rank highly you will also need to focus effort on the ads and discounts features inside of food delivery platforms.

Conquering food delivery algorithms is all about combining organic search optimization with running high performing ads and discounts.

Master these two aspects of food delivery marketing - and your chances for ranking high and increasing orders is extremely high.

In this post we’ll look at what goes into ranking organically and how to optimise for it, show you why paid channels are extremely important, and show you how to optimise your ad performance for maximum visibility.

Why should you care about ranking highly on delivery apps?

The simple truth is that people love food delivery apps. They love convenience, and people will pay for convenience – especially in the UAE.

This has resulted in the UAE’s food delivery market being worth an estimated $2.79 billion. Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem Food, and Noon Food are among the country’s most popular apps, collectively serving millions of users.

For restaurateurs and operators, this means only one thing – an enormous revenue opportunity. Food delivery apps have a massive and loyal customer base, and can drive huge amounts of orders. Ranking optimization helps capture that traffic.

In this context, ranking highly on delivery apps is a crucial piece of the puzzle. The higher you rank, the more revenue you will drive.

This is because online, the majority of clicks go to the top three ranking positions. On Google search, 70% of clicks go to the first three links, and similar patterns have been observed in other search-type systems, including delivery apps.

Studies show that restaurants ranked in the top three positions can receive up to 50% more orders compared to those ranked lower. Additionally, higher rankings can lead to increased visibility, better customer reviews, and enhanced brand loyalty.

Investing time and resources to rank highly on food delivery apps is not just beneficial but essential. The rewards include higher sales, greater customer engagement, and long-term business growth.

If you don’t rank highly your chances of growing order volume, unfortunately, are very low.

Optimizing for organic ranking

Organic rankings on delivery apps refers to listings that show up without any direct promotion through either ads or discounts.

Food delivery apps use sophisticated algorithms to decide which restaurants to show to which users.

There are many factors taken into account, but the key to understanding delivery app ranking is personalization.

Unlike in Google search for example, delivery apps show personalised food ordering options to each user based on their usage of the app.

Will Shu, founder of Deliveroo, is on record as saying ‘Our algorithms are getting smarter every day. They're learning from every order, every route, every delay.’

Personalization on delivery apps involves analyzing lots of user-specific data points. These include past order history, frequently viewed cuisines, preferred delivery times, and especially user location.

For instance, if a user often orders vegetarian dishes, the app is likely to prioritize vegetarian restaurant options in their search results. Similarly, if a user typically orders late-night snacks, the app will highlight restaurants that operate during those hours.

In addition apps like Talabat track user interactions with the app interface. They monitor which restaurants are clicked on but not ordered from, which dishes are added to the cart but not purchased, and which promotional offers entice users to place an order.

This comprehensive data collection helps refine the algorithm's predictions, making future recommendations more accurate and appealing.

This makes sense for users as the results will be more relevant; but for restaurants it makes ranking high difficult to unpack as there is no one-size-fits all strategy you can implement to rank higher.

Ranking highly is a complex challenge. Unlike traditional SEO where specific strategies can be employed to improve visibility, personalization means there is no one-size-fits-all approach. Each user's experience is unique, and thus, the ranking algorithm is tailored to individual preferences.

That’s not to say ranking highly is completely out of your control - far from it in fact.

Ranking factors include:

• Ratings and reviews
• Delivery time
• Overall popularity
• Order fail rate

all things, as a restaurant, you can improve.

When working with clients we often think It’s useful to split ranking factors into two categories. Ones you can control, and ones you can’t.

Once you know what you can control it makes it much easier to focus on what’s important without getting overwhelmed.

Can’t control - distance from user, what the user ordered previously, user preferences.

Can control - ratings and reviews, popularity (ie. amount of orders), missed orders, incorrect orders.

How to increase organic ranking

Now we know what goes into organic ranking, we get a sense of what it takes to jump higher in rank.

There are 4 or 5 delivery apps, each with their own algorithm, and 10+ ranking factors. It’s unknown which is most important.

All together, it’s almost impossible to come up with one single strategy that will will work in all cases for how to improve organic ranking specifically.

Add on top the personalization factors, and it’s even more difficult to understand what you should do to improve ranking.

Instead, the best advice for how to improve organic ranking is to not focus on the delivery platforms at all - but to improve operations.

Consistently delivering a high quality product that customers love, and running an extremely tight ship when it comes to operations is the best way to improve organic ranking.

This means reducing issues with orders and prep time, delays with deliveries, and having excellent customer service.

Revly makes tracking this super easy. We’ve distilled all your key operations metrics into an easy to understand dashboard.

Improve these key operations metrics and increase your average customer rating and you’ll be on the way to ranking higher in delivery apps.

Optimizing your profile to help with visibility and menu views

A sometimes overlooked part of ranking optimization is the content on your profile. Small tweaks can have an impact on overall visibility by improving the conversion rate of your profile and driving more menu views.

Simple updates like adding cuisine or food category type into your tagline can sometimes give you an edge in the listings and reinforce that you are selling exactly what the user is looking for.

Ideas for taglines depending on your type could be:

Healthy Salads

Cookies, Cakes & Desserts

Authentic Italian

But, and this is a big but. The reality of delivery apps today means that whilst improving operations is a great place to start - it’s only one, small piece of the puzzle of delivery app visibility.

This is because, in the past few years, delivery companies have made it possible to run ads and discounts directly inside their apps.

Being able to pay for higher rankings is now the most impactful way of gaining significant and consistent improvement in visibility inside of delivery apps.

The importance of using paid strategies to improve delivery app rankings

Ads and discount strategies are the primary method for boosting rankings on delivery apps.

Without paid promotions or discounts, your visibility will always be lower than those using these tactics.

That’s why, as a food delivery business, you generally cannot afford to skip in-app marketing campaigns.

If you are not running them you are constantly being outranked by those who are. In the UAE for example the amount of restaurants running visibility ads has increased 70% over the past year.

All of the UAE’s food delivery apps, such as Talabat, Deliveroo, Careem Food, and Noon Food, offer paid features designed to enhance your visibility. These features provide an easy and effective way to run high-performing marketing campaigns for online orders.

However, this high performance comes with high competition. Many restaurants and ghost kitchens spend heavily to boost their online visibility, creating a crowded marketplace.

Delivery apps use a cost-per-click (CPC) bidding system for their advertising products. This means that as more restaurants advertise, the cost per click increases.

Without careful monitoring, it’s possible to spend more on advertising than you make back in revenue.

Therefore, while it's crucial to use delivery ads to boost visibility, it's equally important to ensure these ads are optimized, profitable, and aligned with your business goals.

Using advertising to rank higher in delivery apps

As mentioned earlier, all delivery apps have advertising options, but whilst the basic system is the same, there are differences in how each one allows you to run ads. In addition the platforms are also updated frequently with new features and campaign options.

To run ads on delivery platforms you navigate to the “advertising” section in each portal to set up your campaigns and start running ads.

Most platforms provide “done for you” campaigns that make it very easy to launch ads. You set a monthly budget and leave it up to the algorithm to find you the best ads at the best CPC.

However, as with all digital advertising, understanding and making decisions based on data is the key to successful visibility campaigns on delivery apps.

To maximize the benefits of paid strategies, focus on the following:

1. Targeting: Use data insights to target your ads to the right audience. Targeting focused on meal period and day of week ensures your ads reach potential customers who are more likely to place an order.
2. Effective Discounting: Implement strategic discounts to attract new customers and retain existing ones. Ensure these discounts are structured to maintain profitability.
3. Performance Monitoring: Continuously monitor your ad campaigns to assess their effectiveness. Use metrics such as conversion rates, and return on ad spend (ROAS) and contribution margin to gauge performance and make necessary adjustments.
4. Competitive Analysis: Keep an eye on your competitors' advertising strategies. Understanding their tactics can help you refine your own approach and stay competitive.
5. Budget Management: Set a clear budget for your advertising campaigns and stick to it. Allocate funds efficiently to ensure you get the best return on investment.

While paid strategies are essential for improving delivery app rankings, they must be carefully managed and optimized to ensure they are profitable and effective.

With access to the right data, you can start to look at what is really driving revenue in your delivery marketing:

• Understanding what days and hours are most important to bid more for
• Understand if you ads are bringing in more new or returning customers
• Comparing performance on different delivery apps and creating customised strategies for each one.
• Finding profitability for your campaigns
• Understanding contribution margin and ROAS and how it affects your overall revenue performance.

What tools do you need to improve your delivery app ranking?

To improve your ranking on delivery apps you need access to data about both operational and in-app marketing performance.

One option is to access the data from inside your delivery app portal and combine it in a spreadsheet. Typically this is a manual process and sometimes it can be hard to find what you’re looking for - especially if you have multiple brands and outlets.

Many restaurants and cloud kitchens use a middleware provider like Grubtech, Deliverect or Otter. This is another potential source of data, but whilst you can get lots of highly actionable operations data from these systems, they don’t provide dashboards about in-app marketing performance.

Revly is a growth tool for restaurants and cloud kitchens. This means the platform gives you all the data you need for improving in app visibility - in an easily digestible, actionable set of dashboards.

Revly is unique in that it gives you:

1. Uncluttered access to changes in the operations metrics that drive ranking on delivery apps
2. Easily comparable dashboards for ad performance
3. Dashboards that automatically compute metrics like ROAS, contribution margin and conversion rate
4. The ability to quickly launch, edit and plan ad campaigns across all delivery channels in a few clicks.

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