I’m paying for GrabFood ads but orders are not increasing. Why?
Before touching the budget
You can check your listing in a minute and without us: the free automated check at diagnostic.booster.delivery. Paste your restaurant’s Grab or GoFood link and a report is ready in about a minute: rating and how many ratings back it up, photos and descriptions, items switched off right now, what customers complain about in the last 50 reviews, an estimate of lost orders. No login, no account access, no payment. It also works from ChatGPT or Claude: the assistant can hand you a link that starts the check by itself, how to do that.
The diagnostic order
The most common and most expensive cause. While the restaurant is offline, ads either do not run or lead to a closed listing — and the algorithm remembers the unreliability and cuts organic impressions. USSR Phuket had 3,977 offline minutes a month; once removed, search impressions went from zero to 7,481 a month. Enjoy Healthy Food had a 73% offline rate — brought to 0%, impressions grew from 7,038 to 25,543 a month.
If impressions are there and orders are not, ads are not the problem — the listing is. At Etna Phuket, 39,211 people saw the listing monthly and 182 ordered: 0.5% through-conversion against our 0.9% fleet average. Only 5.2% of viewers even opened the menu. Until that is fixed, every ad dollar buys one more look without an order.
A promo lifts your position and cuts your margin at the same time. What matters is not "how many orders the promo brought" but what is left after the discount, the platform commission and the ad spend. A promo that does not pay back looks like order growth and behaves like a loss.
From 4.8 the algorithm serves impressions more generously, and a customer choosing between two listings looks at the number next to the name. Ads bring them to the listing; the rating decides whether they order. USSR Phuket went from 4.5 to 4.8, Zaytun Ubud from 4.67 to 4.8.
Auto-bidding buys cheap, irrelevant impressions: you pay for people who do not click. At Etna we switched to manual CPO with daily management — CTR went from 2.8% to 5.59%, cost per order from 42 to 29 THB, ROAS from 14.75x to 34.57x. The budget rose only 50% while ads revenue grew 3.4x. At Zaytun Ubud, GoFood campaigns were losing money at 0.25x ROAS — Rp 3.1M spent, Rp 763K returned; after the rebuild, 15.52x on nearly the same budget.
The one mistake
Ads are the only lever that works instantly and shows up in a report, so they get pulled first. The other four steps require daily work and produce no pretty chart by day two. Yet they decide what a purchased impression turns into. Ads on an unprepared listing are payment for the speed at which you lose the customer.
What a normal GrabFood funnel looks like
Ads move only the first stage, reach. Whether people open the menu and whether they order is decided by the listing. Medians across 90 GrabFood restaurants in Bali, 26 June to 23 September 2026, 5.8 million people reached, from GrabMerchant dashboards:
End to end, the median restaurant converts 0.82% of reach into orders; the best in the sample 1.85%, more than twice as much on the same kind of traffic. Phuket, 13 restaurants: 8.5% open the menu, 11.7% of them order, 0.98% end to end, best 2.8%. If under 7% open the menu, the problem is what people see in the feed: cover photo, name, rating, delivery time. If under 11% of menu visitors order, the problem is inside the menu: switched-off items, photos on best sellers, prices, promos. Every point below those medians is a share of the ad budget paid for nothing.
Case studies with the full numbers
Etna Phuket — orders x2.2 on falling traffic, ROAS 14.75x → 34.57x. Zaytun Ubud — GoFood ads from a loss-making 0.25x ROAS to 15.52x. Enjoy Healthy Food — revenue x9.4 in 14 months, offline rate 73% → 0%.
Frequently asked
How do I know if my ads are actually paying off?
Delivery Booster clients hold 20–27x, higher in individual campaigns. But ROAS in isolation is misleading: it counts ads revenue and ignores your discount, the platform commission, and the share of those orders you would have received anyway. Read ROAS together with through-conversion and post-promo margin.
If I raise my ad budget, will I get more orders?
If the listing does not convert, a bigger budget buys more views without orders — the fastest way to waste money. At Etna we raised the budget 50% only AFTER fixing the listing and the bidding, and got 3.4x the ads revenue.
How soon will I see my orders start growing?
Delivery Booster’s experience across 110+ restaurants: first movement in 2–4 weeks, full ramp-up in 3–6 months. Availability and bidding respond fastest; listing conversion and rating take longer because the algorithm needs history.
My listing is good — do I still need ads at all?
Yes — but as an amplifier, not a substitute. Ads buy impressions; the listing earns the order. In the right order, ads multiply what already works; in the wrong one, they pay for what does not.
What is a normal conversion rate on GrabFood?
Across 90 GrabFood restaurants managed by Delivery Booster in Bali, 26 June to 23 September 2026 (5.8 million people reached): the median restaurant gets 7.4% of the people who see it to open the menu and 11.5% of menu visitors to order, for an end-to-end reach-to-order conversion of 0.82%; the best restaurant in the sample converts 1.85%. Phuket, 13 restaurants: 8.5%, 11.7% and 0.98%, best 2.8%. If your numbers sit below these medians, the ad budget is spent on people the listing does not keep.
What we find on an account like yours
Not hypotheses — what shows up in the first days when we open the dashboard of a restaurant with this complaint.
In the Delivery Booster benchmark (96 restaurants, 270,568 orders, January-August 2026), on average 25% of revenue leaks past the restaurant, and 95% of that loss is switched-off items — not a closed restaurant (3%), not cancellations (2%). We routinely see 40–70 items off at once, and individual dishes stuck in the stop-list for over 2,000 hours. Every paid click in that window sends someone to a menu where half the bestsellers are missing.
That is the line where ads stop paying back: below it the median ROAS is 12.1x, above it 8.6x. 42% of the restaurants in our fleet are already past that line. The symptom is exactly the one owners arrive with: the budget grows, the orders do not.
The Bali medians we check every account against: Rp 250k average check, 10.4x ROAS, ads at 5.6% of revenue, 0.35% cancellations. Put your own ad share of revenue and your own ROAS next to them — that pair shows immediately whether you are buying orders or impressions.
Reviews are bimodal: 51% five-stars, 28% one-stars and only 3% fours — the extremes make the rating. The Bali median is one negative review per 138 orders. Around 80% of the appeals we file with Grab end with the review removed, but usually nobody is filing them. Meanwhile the ad traffic lands on a listing whose number is already down.
Who does this
None of the above is a one-off setup. Item stops go on and off every day, bids are managed by hand and revised against cost per order, promos are recalculated every week, reviews are traced back to causes. Ads are the last step in that list and the only one you can switch on in five minutes. Hence the temptation to start there.
So "why are my ads not working" turns into "who is going to run the rest of it" almost immediately. There are four options: the owner, an in-house manager, a freelancer or an agency. Given the same task list they produce different results — we broke the difference down separately, who should run GrabFood and GoFood. If the problem is wider than ads and orders are simply low, start at step one: few orders — where to start looking for the cause.
We are Delivery Booster, the agency that runs delivery for restaurants in Bali and Phuket. The numbers above come from our clients’ dashboards and our benchmark across 96 restaurants, not from illustrations.
Keep reading
Two ways to go from here
Both work. The first costs nothing and does not require us.
The method and the norms — open and free
The five stages we run on every account, published in full. Alongside them, market norms from 96 restaurants so you have something to compare your numbers against.
Your listing checked in a minute
An automated check at diagnostic.booster.delivery: paste your Grab or GoFood restaurant link and in about a minute you get the report: rating and ratings count, photos and descriptions, items switched off right now, complaints in the last 50 reviews, an estimate of lost orders. No login, no payment.
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