Sponsored Listings on DoorDash and Uber Eats, Run by Store

Sponsored Listings pay back on availability before they pay back on bidding. Across the estates I have taken over, somewhere between eight and fifteen percent of paid clicks in a given month landed on an item the store had marked unavailable at some point that day, or on a store that was paused when the click arrived. Fixing menu sync and the auto-pause rules moves blended cost per order further than a rebid does, and it costs nothing in media. That is where this engagement starts, before anyone touches a bid. What the work covers: Campaign structure in the DoorDash Merchant Portal and Uber Eats Manager, split by store cohort rather than by brand, so a lunchtime CBD store and a suburban dinner store stop sharing a budget rule that suits neither. Item naming for the placements that actually render, since the sponsored carousel truncates a title long before your menu does and the words that survive decide the click. Modifier group pricing, which quietly determines whether a sponsored order is profitable once platform commission is taken. Promotion stacking: a Sponsored Listing running on top of a platform-funded delivery offer is often buying an order you had already won. Measurement, and what I will not accept as a result: Platform-reported return is last-touch inside a closed app and it counts the regular who orders from you every Thursday. I run store-level holdouts, matched cohorts with ads off in the control group for a defined window, and report incremental orders next to the platform number. Where the incremental read comes back flat, I will say so and recommend cutting the budget rather than restructuring the account for another quarter. I would rather hand budget back than defend a number I do not believe. Markets: DoorDash and Uber Eats work is for estates in Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Japan. For Singapore and Malaysia the same method runs on GrabFood and foodpanda, where the auction is thinner and the availability problem is worse. I work in English and Mandarin, which matters when menu naming has to read correctly in both. Not included: Food photography and menu description copywriting. POS and middleware engineering: I specify what has to be true of the availability sync and test it against live order data, but your integrator builds it. Ratings and review response. Anything framed as organic ranking optimisation, because neither platform sells placement in that surface, and what is sold under that name is availability, prep time and ratings, which are operational problems wearing a marketing label. Who this is not for: Single-site operators. The method reads stores against each other and one store gives nothing to read against. Brands whose delivery contribution margin is negative before media, because advertising into that faster is not a strategy and you will hear it in the first call rather than the third month. Anyone who wants a return target committed in writing before I have seen store-level order and availability data. How it runs: The first fortnight is data: store-level order history, availability and pause logs, campaign exports, commission terms, and your delivery profit and loss by site. Then the read and the plan, written so your finance lead can argue with it line by line. From there you either run it with a monthly review from me, or I run it and your team keeps the menu honest. Either way the operations owner is named on the first page, because most findings in this work have an owner outside marketing.