How to Advertise on Zomato in India: A Complete Brand and Restaurant Guide to Zomato Ads, Costs, and Campaign Strategy for 2025–2026

Most brands that come to us asking about Zomato advertising have already spent two or three months running campaigns on their own — and most of them have been quietly burning budget without understanding why their sponsored listings are not converting the way they expected. The platform has matured considerably since its early days, and Deepinder Goyal's vision of Zomato Limited as a "food company" rather than merely a food delivery platform has created an advertising ecosystem that is genuinely more sophisticated than most media planners give it credit for. What surprises our clients most is not the reach — it is the quality of intent data sitting underneath every ad placement, which makes Zomato ads a fundamentally different proposition from display advertising on a general-purpose network.

What Is Zomato Advertising and How Does It Work?

Zomato advertising is, at its core, a performance and brand visibility system built on top of one of India's most transactionally active mobile platforms — a food delivery platform that, as of early 2025, counts somewhere in the ballpark of 100 million monthly active users, a number that has been climbing steadily since the post-pandemic normalisation of food delivery behaviour across metro cities and increasingly into Tier 2 cities as well. The platform allows both restaurant partners and non-food brands to place paid placements across the app's discovery and ordering interface, which means the advertising inventory spans everything from the moment a user opens the app to the moment they are waiting for their order to arrive.

What a lot of people miss is the intent layer. When someone opens Zomato on a Saturday evening, they are not passively scrolling the way they might on Instagram; they are actively in a decision-making mode, which is a fundamentally different mental state for an advertiser to reach them in. The platform's advertising engine uses a combination of location data, order history, cuisine preferences, and behavioural signals — all first-party data, which has become increasingly valuable as third-party cookies continue their slow death across the broader digital advertising ecosystem. At SmartAds, we always tell our clients that advertising on a platform where purchase intent is already present is worth a significant premium over equivalent reach on a platform where you are interrupting someone's entertainment.

The mechanics of how Zomato ads work depend on which format you are using, but the fundamental model is an auction-based system for sponsored listings and CPC-driven placements, layered with fixed-cost brand advertising options for larger budgets. Restaurant partners access the system through the Zomato for Restaurants dashboard, which has been progressively upgraded to give more granular campaign controls; non-restaurant brands go through a managed media buying process via Zomato's direct sales team. The distinction matters because it affects how quickly you can launch, what targeting options are available to you, and how transparent the reporting actually is — a point we will return to in some detail later.

Who Can Advertise on Zomato? Not Just Restaurants

The honest answer is that the platform is more open than most people realise, and the category of non-food brands advertising on Zomato has grown substantially over the past two years. Restaurants and cloud kitchens are the obvious primary advertisers — and they remain the backbone of Zomato's advertising revenue — but brands from fintech, fashion, e-commerce, gaming, FMCG, and even insurance have run campaigns on the platform, often with results that surprised even us when we first started planning those campaigns.

The logic for non-food brands is straightforward once you think about the audience composition. Zomato's monthly active users skew urban, 22-to-38, with disposable income and demonstrated willingness to transact digitally — a profile that fintech brands, credit card companies, and premium e-commerce brands pay a significant premium to reach on Meta or Google. One fintech client we worked with ran a Zomato campaign targeting users in Mumbai and Delhi who had demonstrated a pattern of ordering from premium restaurant categories; the campaign's click-through rate was roughly 2.3 times higher than their concurrent Meta campaign targeting a demographically similar audience, which validated our hypothesis that high-intent platform users carry that transactional mindset across ad categories too.

Rebel Foods, Domino's India, McDonald's India, and other large QSR chains use Zomato advertising extensively, but so do brands that have nothing to do with food delivery. Zomato Gold and Blinkit have also created interesting advertising adjacencies — a brand advertising alongside Blinkit's quick commerce inventory, for instance, is reaching someone who is already in an impulse-purchase mindset, which is genuinely valuable context for certain product categories. At SmartAds, our media planning team has found that the most underutilised opportunity on the platform right now is for premium lifestyle brands targeting the same urban millennial cohort that drives Zomato's core order volume.

Zomato Ad Formats Explained: Sponsored Listings, Banner Ads, Homepage Takeovers, and More

The range of Zomato ad formats available is wider than most advertisers realise when they first approach the platform, and choosing the wrong format for your objective is probably the single most common reason campaigns underperform. Sponsored listings are the workhorse format — these are the promoted restaurant cards that appear at the top of search results and category pages, marked with a small "Ad" label, which most users have learned to overlook in the same way they overlook the "Sponsored" tag on Google search results. The format works on a cost-per-click basis, which means you are only paying when someone actually taps through to your restaurant page; the efficiency of this depends heavily on how well your listing itself is optimised, a point most restaurant advertising guides skip over entirely.

Banner ads on Zomato occupy premium real estate within the app's browsing experience — these appear within the restaurant discovery feed, on category pages, and within the order tracking screen, which is a particularly interesting placement because the user is captive and has nothing else to do while they wait. Homepage takeover is the format that brand advertising teams tend to get excited about, and with good reason: it gives a brand full-screen or near-full-screen visibility to every user who opens the app on a given day or within a defined time window, which makes it a powerful tool for launches, festive campaigns, and brand awareness pushes. The cost for a homepage takeover is considerably higher than for performance formats — somewhere in the range of several lakhs per day for a national campaign — but the reach numbers justify the investment for brands with the right objectives.

In-feed native ads are a format that has grown in importance as Zomato has expanded its content and editorial surfaces; these are placements that appear within curated content sections, food stories, and recommendation feeds, which gives them a less intrusive character than banner ads and typically generates better engagement metrics. Push notifications are another format that is often overlooked in formal media plans but which Zomato sells as a managed advertising product — these go directly to opted-in users and carry an open rate that, in our experience, is significantly higher than email marketing benchmarks. On top of that, Zomato has been developing what it calls Off-App Visit Pack advertising, which is designed specifically to drive physical footfall to restaurant locations rather than delivery orders — a format that bridges the gap between digital advertising and out-of-home restaurant discovery in a way that most food delivery platform advertising has historically failed to do.

How Much Does Zomato Advertising Cost in India? A 2025–2026 Pricing Reality Check

Frankly speaking, the pricing question is where most online resources either go vague or give numbers that are so out of date they are actively misleading. Zomato advertising cost varies significantly based on format, city, competition level, and campaign objective, which makes a single-number answer genuinely useless — but we can give you the benchmarks that our media planning team works with when building client proposals.

For sponsored listings, the CPC model means your actual cost per click depends on the auction dynamics in your specific location and category. In highly competitive markets like Mumbai, Delhi, and Bangalore, where restaurant density is extreme and multiple brands are bidding for the same placement, the cost per click can work out to somewhere between ₹8 and ₹25 depending on the cuisine category and time of day — which is a number that surprises most first-time advertisers when they compare it to what they are paying for Google Search clicks in similarly competitive categories. In Tier 2 cities, the same placement can be acquired for considerably less, often in the ₹3 to ₹10 range, which is one of the reasons we have been actively recommending Zomato advertising to regional restaurant chains looking to establish dominance in markets where the competitive pressure is lower. The minimum budget to start a sponsored listing campaign is accessible for most restaurant partners — you can begin testing with as little as ₹500 per day, which makes it genuinely viable for small restaurants to run meaningful experiments before committing to larger monthly budgets.

For brand advertising formats — banner ads, homepage takeovers, in-feed native ads — the pricing shifts to a CPM or fixed-cost model, and the numbers are meaningfully different. A homepage takeover for a national campaign is typically priced in the range of several lakhs per day, which puts it firmly in the territory of large brand budgets; banner ads within the app feed can be acquired at a CPM that works out to roughly ₹80 to ₹150 depending on targeting specificity, which is competitive with premium digital inventory on other platforms but comes with the intent-quality premium we described earlier. The Zomato sponsored listing cost per month for a moderately competitive restaurant in a metro city, running a consistent campaign, typically falls somewhere between ₹15,000 and ₹60,000 — a range that reflects enormous variation in category competition and bidding strategy rather than any fixed rate card.

CPC vs CPM: Which Pricing Model Is Right for Your Zomato Campaign?

This is a question our clients ask constantly, and the honest answer is that it depends entirely on what you are trying to achieve — which sounds like a deflection but is actually the most useful frame for making the decision. Cost per click advertising on Zomato, which is the model that powers sponsored listings and most performance-oriented placements, is the right choice when your primary objective is driving orders, visits to your restaurant page, or any other measurable conversion action; you are paying for demonstrated interest, and the platform's intent environment means that interest is relatively high quality compared to CPC on general display networks.

Cost per thousand impressions pricing, which governs the brand advertising formats like homepage takeovers and banner ads, makes sense when your objective is brand awareness, brand visibility, or reach at scale — when you are launching a new restaurant, entering a new city, or running a festive campaign where the goal is to be seen rather than immediately clicked. The CPM model gives you predictable reach and allows you to plan brand awareness campaigns with the kind of frequency and scale that performance marketing cannot deliver efficiently. What we tell our clients at SmartAds is that the most effective Zomato campaigns we have managed combine both models: a CPM-driven brand layer that builds awareness and a CPC-driven performance layer that captures the intent that awareness generates, which mirrors the full-funnel approach that sophisticated digital advertising strategy has always recommended.

One nuance that is worth understanding is that Zomato's auction system for CPC placements is not purely price-driven — relevance scores, listing quality, and historical performance data all influence where your ad appears, which means a well-optimised listing with a lower bid can outperform a poorly optimised listing with a higher one. This is analogous to Google's Quality Score system, and it has the same implication: investing in your creative and listing quality is not separate from your media buying strategy, it is part of it. We have seen this dynamic play out repeatedly with restaurant partners who were frustrated by poor performance despite adequate budgets, and in almost every case the issue was listing quality rather than bid level.

How to Set Up Your First Zomato Ad Campaign Step by Step

The process for how to run ads on Zomato differs depending on whether you are a restaurant partner or a non-restaurant brand, and conflating the two creates confusion that we see constantly in briefing documents from new clients. For restaurant partners, the entry point is the Zomato for Restaurants dashboard — a self-serve interface that has been significantly improved over the past two years and now gives restaurant owners access to campaign creation, budget management, targeting controls, and performance reporting in a single interface. The first step is ensuring your restaurant listing itself is complete, accurate, and visually compelling, because the listing is what users see when they click your sponsored listing ad; a poorly photographed menu or an incomplete description will kill your conversion rate regardless of how well your ad placement performs.

Once your listing is in order, the campaign setup process within the Zomato for Restaurants dashboard involves selecting your campaign objective — typically either visibility or orders — setting a daily or total campaign budget, choosing your targeting parameters, and setting your bid. The platform offers automated bidding options that adjust your CPC bid based on real-time auction dynamics, which we generally recommend for advertisers who are new to the platform and do not yet have the historical data to make informed manual bid decisions. After your campaign goes live, there is typically a learning period of several days during which the algorithm is calibrating delivery against your objectives; making significant changes to targeting or budget during this period tends to reset the learning and extend the time before you see stable performance data.

For non-restaurant brands and larger brand advertising campaigns, the process is managed rather than self-serve — you work with Zomato's direct sales team to define your campaign objectives, select formats, negotiate rates, and set up targeting. This process is slower and requires a larger minimum commitment, but it gives access to premium formats and more sophisticated targeting options that are not available through the self-serve dashboard. At SmartAds, we manage this process on behalf of our clients, which means we bring existing relationships and rate knowledge to the negotiation — a practical advantage that translates into better placements and more favourable terms than a brand going direct for the first time would typically achieve.

Zomato Targeting Options: Location, Demographics, Cuisine, and Behaviour

The targeting options available on Zomato are, in our assessment, one of the platform's most underappreciated strengths — and most advertisers use only a fraction of what is available. Geo-targeting is the most commonly used capability, and it operates at a genuinely granular level: you can target by city, by neighbourhood, or by a defined radius around a specific location, which makes hyperlocal advertising for restaurants with a defined delivery zone straightforward to execute. This level of geo-targeting precision is what makes Zomato advertising particularly valuable for restaurant advertising in dense urban markets, where a restaurant in Bandra has no reason to pay for impressions being served to users in Andheri if its delivery radius does not extend that far.

Audience targeting on Zomato goes beyond geography, though, and this is where the platform's first-party data becomes genuinely powerful. The platform can target users based on cuisine preferences derived from their order history, which means a new Italian restaurant can specifically reach users who have demonstrated a pattern of ordering Italian food — a level of category targeting that is not available on most other digital advertising platforms. Demographic targeting by age, gender, and device type is available, as is behavioural targeting based on order frequency, average order value, and recency of last order, which allows advertisers to distinguish between high-value frequent orderers and occasional users and allocate budget accordingly. We worked with an automotive brand that used Zomato's high-average-order-value audience segment to reach premium consumers in Delhi and Mumbai, and the campaign's brand recall metrics, measured through a post-campaign survey, were meaningfully above the benchmarks we had established from their concurrent campaigns on other platforms.

The targeting options available for Tier 2 cities and Tier 3 cities have expanded as Zomato's user base has grown beyond the original metro-city concentration, which creates interesting opportunities for regional brands and national brands looking to establish presence in emerging markets. Hyperlocal advertising in cities like Indore, Surat, Coimbatore, or Jaipur — where Zomato's penetration has grown significantly — can be executed with the same geo-targeting precision as in Mumbai or Delhi, but at CPC rates that are considerably more favourable because competition for those placements is lower. This is an opportunity that, frankly speaking, most national brands have been slow to act on, which means the window for establishing early dominance in those markets at efficient cost is still open.

How to Measure ROI on Zomato Ads: CTR, ROAS, and Conversion Tracking

Measuring ROI on Zomato advertising is more tractable than many clients expect when they first raise the question, but it requires clarity about what you are actually trying to measure — which is a conversation that should happen before the campaign launches, not after. For restaurant partners using sponsored listings, the primary metrics are click-through rate, which tells you how compelling your listing appears relative to organic alternatives, and conversion rate from click to order, which tells you how effectively your listing page is closing the interest that the ad generates. The Zomato for Restaurants dashboard reports both of these, along with total orders attributed to the campaign and revenue generated, which gives you the inputs you need to calculate a basic ROAS.

The ROAS calculation for sponsored listings is straightforward in principle: divide the revenue attributed to campaign-driven orders by the total ad spend, and you have a return on ad spend figure. In practice, the attribution question is more complicated, because Zomato's attribution model credits the last ad interaction before an order, which can overstate the campaign's contribution in cases where the user would have ordered anyway after seeing the listing organically. We recommend our clients look at incremental order volume — the difference in orders during campaign periods versus comparable non-campaign periods — as a more conservative and more honest measure of what the advertising is actually generating. One retail food brand we worked with in Pune was initially reporting a ROAS of 4.2x based on platform-attributed revenue, but when we applied an incrementality analysis, the true incremental ROAS was closer to 2.8x — still positive and worth continuing, but a more accurate basis for budget decisions.

For brand advertising formats, the measurement framework shifts toward brand awareness and brand visibility metrics: reach, frequency, click-through rate on banner ads, and where budget allows, brand lift studies that measure recall and consideration among exposed versus unexposed audiences. Zomato offers brand lift measurement as part of larger managed campaigns, which gives advertisers a more rigorous basis for evaluating the brand awareness investment. At SmartAds, we integrate Zomato campaign data with our clients' broader digital analytics — Google Analytics, their own CRM data, and where applicable, data-driven attribution models — to build a picture of how Zomato advertising contributes to the overall customer acquisition funnel rather than evaluating it in isolation.

Zomato vs Swiggy Advertising: Which Platform Gives Better Returns?

This is probably the question we get asked most often by restaurant clients who are deciding where to allocate their digital advertising budget, and the honest answer is that the right choice depends on your specific market, your restaurant category, and your campaign objective — but there are meaningful differences between the two platforms that should inform the decision. Swiggy's advertising platform has been evolving in parallel with Zomato's, and both platforms now offer broadly similar format repertoires: sponsored listings, banner ads, push notifications, and brand advertising packages. The competitive dynamics between the two platforms have been good for advertisers, because it has kept pricing relatively competitive and pushed both platforms to improve their targeting capabilities and reporting transparency.

Where Zomato tends to have an advantage, in our experience, is in the depth of its restaurant discovery behaviour — users who are actively browsing and comparing restaurants rather than just reordering from a familiar list — which makes sponsored listings and brand advertising formats more effective for new restaurant launches and category expansion campaigns. Swiggy, on the other hand, has invested heavily in its Instamart quick commerce offering, which creates advertising adjacencies that are interesting for FMCG and grocery-adjacent brands in a way that Blinkit creates for Zomato. The monthly active users numbers for both platforms are broadly comparable in aggregate, though the distribution across cities and user demographics differs in ways that matter for specific campaign objectives.

One practical consideration that does not get discussed enough is the quality of reporting and campaign management tools available to self-serve advertisers. Both platforms have improved significantly, but the Zomato for Restaurants dashboard has, in our assessment, moved ahead in terms of the granularity of data available and the ease of making real-time campaign adjustments. We have managed campaigns on both platforms simultaneously for several clients, and the optimisation cycle — the time from identifying a performance issue to implementing a fix and seeing the result — tends to be faster on Zomato's self-serve system. That said, neither platform has achieved the reporting transparency of Google Ads or Meta, which remains a legitimate frustration for performance marketing teams who are accustomed to more granular data.

AI-Powered and Personalised Ads on Zomato: What Is New in 2025?

The integration of AI into Zomato's advertising products has accelerated meaningfully over the past 18 months, and it is changing the practical experience of running campaigns on the platform in ways that are worth understanding before you build your 2025 strategy. AI-generated ads — specifically, the platform's ability to dynamically assemble ad creative from restaurant imagery, menu data, and user preference signals — have been rolled out to a growing proportion of restaurant partners, which means the ad that a user sees for your restaurant can now be automatically personalised based on what the platform knows about their cuisine preferences and order history. This is a meaningful shift from the static creative model that dominated Zomato's early advertising products, and it has implications for how restaurant partners should think about their asset libraries.

The practical implication is that having a rich, high-quality set of food photography and menu assets in your Zomato listing is no longer just good housekeeping — it is the raw material from which the platform's AI is assembling your ads, which means the quality of your assets directly determines the quality of your AI-generated ad creative. We have seen restaurant partners with excellent photography achieve significantly better engagement rates on AI-personalised placements compared to partners with mediocre assets, which suggests that the creative investment pays off in the AI era just as much as it did in the static creative era, albeit through a different mechanism. At SmartAds, we now include a listing asset audit as a standard part of our Zomato campaign setup process, because we have found it to be one of the highest-leverage interventions available for improving campaign performance without increasing spend.

Zomato's AI capabilities also extend to bidding optimisation, audience prediction, and delivery timing — the platform can now identify the time windows during which a specific user is most likely to place an order and concentrate ad delivery accordingly, which improves the efficiency of the CPC budget. This kind of AI-driven campaign optimisation is increasingly the default rather than the exception on sophisticated digital advertising platforms, and Zomato's implementation is broadly comparable to what Meta and Google have been offering for several years. The data-driven nature of these optimisations means that campaigns benefit from longer run times, because the algorithm needs sufficient data to calibrate effectively — a practical argument for consistent monthly advertising budgets rather than sporadic campaign bursts.

Zomato Advertising for Non-Food Brands: Fintech, Fashion, and Beyond

The opportunity for non-food brands on Zomato is one of the most consistently underestimated in Indian digital advertising planning, and we say this as a team that has seen the results from multiple campaigns across categories that have nothing to do with food delivery. The platform's audience — urban, young, digitally active, transactionally comfortable — is one that fintech brands, fashion e-commerce brands, and premium consumer goods companies pay significant premiums to reach on other platforms; the fact that they can reach the same audience on Zomato, often at competitive CPMs, with the added benefit of a high-intent platform environment, is a genuine strategic opportunity.

For fintech brands specifically, the Zomato user base skews toward the exact demographic that is actively adopting digital payment products, credit cards, and investment apps — and the platform's transaction history data creates targeting possibilities that are genuinely useful for financial product advertising. A credit card brand targeting users with high average order values and frequent ordering behaviour is effectively targeting people who are already comfortable spending and who have demonstrated digital transaction behaviour, which is a more refined audience than a broad demographic target on a general-purpose platform. Influencer marketing integrations within the Zomato ecosystem — through food influencers and content creators who are part of Zomato's creator programmes — offer another channel for non-food brands to reach the platform's audience in a contextually relevant way.

Fashion and e-commerce brands have found success with Zomato's banner ad and in-feed native ad formats, particularly during festive periods when users are in a generally elevated purchase mindset. The IPL season, Diwali, Eid, and regional festivals like Pongal represent peak advertising periods on Zomato, during which both order volumes and app engagement spike significantly — and during which brand advertising inventory is correspondingly more competitive and more expensive. We recommend that non-food brands plan their Zomato advertising calendar around these peaks well in advance, because premium inventory during IPL or Diwali is typically booked several weeks ahead, and last-minute campaigns end up either paying a significant premium or settling for less desirable placements.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Running Zomato Ads

Most brands get the basics wrong in the same predictable ways, and having seen enough campaigns across enough categories, we have developed a fairly clear picture of where the money gets wasted. The most common mistake is treating Zomato advertising as a set-and-forget channel — launching a sponsored listing campaign, setting a budget, and then checking results once a month. The platform's auction dynamics change constantly as competitors adjust their bids, new restaurants enter the market, and seasonal demand patterns shift; a campaign that was performing well in January may be significantly less efficient by March if you have not been actively monitoring and adjusting.

A/B testing is another area where most restaurant advertising campaigns fall short. The platform allows you to run different creative approaches — different headline copy, different imagery, different promotional offers — and compare their performance, which is a capability that most restaurant partners simply do not use. We have seen cases where a simple change in the promotional offer highlighted in a sponsored listing — switching from a percentage discount to a free delivery offer, for instance — produced a meaningful improvement in click-through rate without any change in the underlying bid or budget. On top of that, compliance with ASCI guidelines and FSSAI regulations is something that restaurant partners sometimes overlook in their advertising creative; claims about food quality, health benefits, or pricing need to meet the standards set by these bodies, and violations can result in ad disapproval or, in more serious cases, formal complaints.

The transparency issue around Zomato's Sponsored Listing Service Request Form is something we feel obligated to mention, because we have seen restaurant partners sign up for managed sponsored listing packages without fully understanding the commitment they are making. The SRF typically involves a minimum spend commitment and a defined campaign period, and the terms around pausing, modifying, or exiting the campaign are not always as flexible as the sales conversation implies. Our advice to restaurant partners is to read the SRF carefully before signing, to clarify the terms around campaign modification and cancellation, and to start with a shorter commitment period if you are new to the platform — the ability to pause or modify your Zomato campaign after it goes live depends on which product you have signed up for, and the self-serve dashboard gives considerably more flexibility than a managed SRF commitment.

Best Practices for Maximising Your Zomato Advertising Budget in India

The brands that get the best results from Zomato advertising are almost always the ones that approach it as an integrated part of their broader digital strategy rather than a standalone channel — and this is a principle that applies equally to a small restaurant in Indore spending ₹500 per day and a national QSR chain spending several crores annually. The integration point that matters most is the relationship between your Zomato advertising and your Google Ads strategy: users who see your Zomato ad and do not immediately convert will often search for your restaurant or brand on Google shortly afterward, which means your Google presence needs to be strong enough to capture that intent. We have seen campaigns where Zomato advertising drove a measurable lift in branded Google searches, which reinforced our view that the two channels work together in a way that makes the combined investment more efficient than either channel in isolation.

Budget scaling on Zomato follows a logic that is worth understanding before you commit to a monthly spend level. Starting at ₹500 per day gives you enough data to understand your baseline performance metrics — click-through rate, conversion rate, cost per order — but it is not enough to draw statistically reliable conclusions about targeting or creative performance. Scaling to ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 per day allows for meaningful A/B testing and gives the platform's algorithm sufficient data to optimise delivery effectively; scaling beyond ₹50,000 per month typically justifies a conversation with Zomato's managed advertising team about access to premium formats and more sophisticated targeting options. The scaling process should be gradual — doubling budgets overnight tends to disrupt the algorithm's optimisation and produce a period of inefficient delivery before performance stabilises.

Seasonal strategy on Zomato deserves more deliberate planning than most brands give it. The IPL season drives a documented spike in food delivery orders, as does Diwali, Eid, and major sporting events; during these periods, both the competition for ad placements and the volume of users actively ordering increases simultaneously, which means your campaign needs to be prepared with higher bids, refreshed creative, and promotional offers that are competitive with what other restaurants are running. At SmartAds, we build seasonal advertising calendars for our Zomato clients that anticipate these peaks and allocate budget accordingly — typically front-loading spend in the days leading up to a peak rather than during it, because the cost of reaching users who are already in a high-intent state tends to be lower when you reach them before the peak bidding competition kicks in. The integration of Zomato advertising with broader omnichannel campaigns — coordinating with OOH, radio, and digital display to create a consistent brand message across touchpoints — is something we have found consistently produces better brand recall and conversion outcomes than any single channel can achieve on its own.

Frequently Asked Questions About Zomato Advertising

Q: How much does it cost to advertise on Zomato in India?

The cost of Zomato advertising depends significantly on the format you choose and the market you are targeting. For sponsored listings on a CPC basis, the cost per click in metro cities like Mumbai and Delhi typically works out to somewhere between ₹8 and ₹25, while Tier 2 cities can be considerably more affordable, often in the ₹3 to ₹10 range. Brand advertising formats like banner ads and homepage takeovers are priced on a CPM or fixed-cost basis, with CPMs typically in the ₹80 to ₹150 range for targeted placements. The minimum budget to start is accessible — ₹500 per day is enough to begin testing sponsored listings — but meaningful campaign learning requires a sustained budget over several weeks rather than a one-time spend.

Q: What types of businesses can advertise on Zomato besides restaurants?

Non-food brands across fintech, fashion, e-commerce, gaming, FMCG, and consumer services have all run successful campaigns on Zomato. The platform's urban, young, digitally active audience makes it attractive for any brand targeting that demographic, and Zomato's first-party data on transaction behaviour, order frequency, and average spend creates targeting capabilities that are genuinely useful for non-restaurant advertisers. The access point for non-food brands is Zomato's direct sales team rather than the self-serve dashboard, which means the process is more managed and typically requires a larger minimum commitment.

Q: What ad formats are available on the Zomato advertising platform?

Zomato ad formats include sponsored listings (CPC-based promoted restaurant cards in search and category results), banner ads within the app's browsing interface, homepage takeovers for full-screen brand visibility, in-feed native ads within content and recommendation surfaces, push notifications to opted-in users, and the Off-App Visit Pack programme designed to drive physical footfall. Each format serves different objectives — sponsored listings for performance and order generation, brand advertising formats for awareness and visibility — and the most effective campaigns typically combine formats across the funnel rather than relying on a single placement type.

Q: What is the minimum budget required to start a Zomato ad campaign?

For restaurant partners using the self-serve Zomato for Restaurants dashboard, the minimum budget to start a sponsored listing campaign is approximately ₹500 per day, which makes it accessible for small restaurants and independent operators. For managed brand advertising campaigns — including banner ads, homepage takeovers, and non-restaurant brand campaigns — the minimum commitment is considerably higher and is negotiated directly with Zomato's sales team. We generally recommend that restaurant partners starting out commit to at least two to four weeks of consistent spend before drawing conclusions about performance, because the platform's algorithm needs time to optimise delivery.

Q: How do I set up a sponsored listing on Zomato for my restaurant?

The process begins with the Zomato for Restaurants dashboard, where you can access the advertising section after verifying your restaurant account. Before setting up your campaign, ensure your listing is complete — high-quality photographs, accurate menu with pricing, correct operating hours, and a compelling restaurant description — because the listing is what converts the click into an order. Within the dashboard, you select your campaign objective, set your daily budget, configure your targeting (location radius, time of day, audience segments), and set your bid. The platform offers automated bidding for new advertisers, which we recommend as a starting point before moving to manual bid management once you have baseline performance data.

Q: What is the difference between CPC and CPM pricing on Zomato?

Cost per click pricing means you pay only when a user clicks on your ad, which makes it the appropriate model for performance objectives like driving orders or restaurant page visits. Cost per thousand impressions pricing means you pay for every thousand times your ad is displayed, regardless of whether users click — this model is suited for brand awareness and brand visibility objectives where reach and frequency matter more than immediate conversion. CPC is the model for sponsored listings; CPM governs brand advertising formats. The right choice depends on your campaign objective, and the most sophisticated campaigns use both models in combination to address different stages of the customer journey.

Q: How can I measure the ROI of my Zomato advertising campaign?

For restaurant partners, the Zomato for Restaurants dashboard reports campaign-attributed orders, revenue, click-through rate, and cost per order, which gives you the inputs for a basic ROAS calculation. We recommend supplementing platform-reported attribution with an incrementality analysis — comparing order volumes during campaign periods to comparable non-campaign periods — to get a more conservative and accurate picture of what the advertising is actually generating. For brand advertising campaigns, ROI measurement should include brand lift metrics, reach and frequency data, and integration with broader digital analytics to understand how Z