The question most restaurants skip
Most restaurants decide whether advertising is worth it by watching whether sales went up during a campaign. That answers a different question than whether the campaign was profitable. A campaign can increase total orders while still losing money on each one, if the ad cost per order exceeds the margin that order produces.
The break-even number
Start from your margin per order, calculated the same way as in our delivery profit margin guide: order value, minus cost of goods, minus commission, minus packaging. That margin figure is the most you can spend acquiring one order through ads and still break even. Spend less than that per order acquired, and advertising is adding profit. Spend more, and it is quietly costing you.
| If cost per order acquired is | Then advertising is |
|---|---|
| Below your margin per order | Adding profit |
| Equal to your margin per order | Breaking even, no net gain |
| Above your margin per order | Costing you money per order |
The two numbers that decide the answer
Margin per order
Your ceiling for what ads can cost per order
Cost per order acquired
Must stay below the ceiling to be worth it
Get help running the break-even numbers for your account
Working out cost per order from ad spend
Cost per order acquired through ads is total ad spend over a period divided by the number of orders that period's campaigns actually drove, not total orders in that period, since some of those would have happened without the ad. This is harder to measure precisely on a self-serve CPC platform than it sounds, since not every order can be perfectly attributed, but tracking spend against campaign-period order lift gives a workable estimate.
- Know your margin per order first, this is your ceiling.
- Track total ad spend over a defined period.
- Estimate orders genuinely driven by that spend, not total orders.
- Compare cost per order acquired against your margin ceiling.
Why this changes over time, not just once
A campaign that pays back today can stop paying back if competitors raise their bids in the same keywords or delivery radius, which is part of why ongoing bid review and removing underperforming keywords matters more than a one-time setup. This is the kind of account maintenance we do for clients running delivery ads on an ongoing basis.