How to Track Competitor Restaurant Promotions Across Delivery Apps

To track competitor restaurant promotions, record the offer mechanic, eligibility, restaurant, platform, customer state, placement and observation time as separate fields. Recheck the same panel to build a history. “First seen” and “last seen” are observation bounds unless exact campaign dates are available. Competitor observations can show how an offer appears and spreads, but they cannot prove the campaign's motive, spend, profitability or incremental sales.

Key points

• Track the offer, not only the discounted price.
• Preserve the restaurant and customer conditions that made the offer visible.
• Keep regular price, promotional price, fees and sponsored placement separate.
• Use an explicit denominator for rollout breadth.
• Treat competitor observations as market evidence, not proof of ROI.

What is restaurant promotion tracking?

Restaurant promotion tracking is the repeated observation of customer-facing offers across a defined set of restaurants, platforms, locations and account states.

The goal is to answer specific questions such as:

• Which offer mechanics are visible?
• Who appears eligible?
• How many monitored restaurants show the offer?
• On which platforms and customer journeys does it appear?
• When was it first and last observed?
• Did visibility or menu placement change while it was active?

Getplace's restaurant pricing intelligence page describes alerts and retained history for promotion starts and ends. Product-page claims describe current capability, not an independently measured market result. The monitoring method still needs a defined panel and evidence rules.

Six parts of a comparable promotion record

1. Promotion mechanic

Classify what the offer does. Examples include percentage discount, fixed discount, multibuy, free item, free delivery, bundle price or loyalty reward. Do not group all mechanics under one “discount” label.

2. Eligibility

Record the conditions a customer must meet:

• minimum basket value;
• selected items;
• new or returning customer status;
• membership or subscription;
• payment method;
• promo code;
• day, time or order channel.

An offer that is visible but unavailable to the test account is different from a public offer.

3. Geography and restaurant

Use a stable restaurant identifier, address and customer location. Report the number of eligible monitored restaurants as the denominator. A banner seen at three locations is not evidence of a city-wide campaign unless the panel supports that conclusion.

4. Platform and account state

The same brand may show different offers on different apps or accounts. Record platform, logged-in state, membership, customer history where known and delivery location.

5. Placement

Keep the offer mechanic separate from how it is displayed. Record whether it appears in a banner, search result, restaurant card, menu or checkout. Sponsored placement is a visibility field, not a discount type.

6. Time and duration

Record timestamp and time zone for every observation. Unless exact dates are shown or continuously monitored, use “first seen” and “last seen”. The campaign may have started earlier or ended later.

A practical delivery-app promotion workflow

1. Start with the decision

Decide whether the team wants to compare offer mechanics, rollout breadth, duration, placement or competitive timing. The question determines the panel and cadence.

2. Define the observation panel

List the brands, restaurants, platforms, customer locations, account states and time windows to be checked. Preserve entries that could not be observed.

3. Use one promotion taxonomy

Define mechanics and eligibility fields before collection. Keep an “other” category with the original listing text so unusual offers are not forced into the wrong group.

4. Separate price, fee and promotion components

Store regular item price, promotional item price, delivery fee, service fee, small-order fee and discount separately. A lower checkout total may come from one or several components.

5. Match restaurants and offers

Use stable restaurant identifiers and an offer identifier built from the mechanic, eligibility and visible wording. Similar text does not always mean the same campaign.

6. Recheck and build history

Repeat the same observations at the planned cadence. Keep candidate starts and ends as provisional until they pass the team's confirmation rule.

7. Connect observations to first-party performance

Competitor tracking can provide context for your own campaign analysis. Measure your own orders, revenue, margin and customer behaviour with first-party data. A competitor offer appearing at the same time as a performance change does not establish causation.

Which promotion metrics are useful?

Use clearly labelled measures with visible denominators:

• Observed rollout rate: monitored eligible restaurants showing the offer divided by monitored eligible restaurants successfully checked.
• Platform spread: platforms where the offer was observed divided by platforms in the defined panel.
• Observation window: time between first seen and last seen, labelled as a lower bound rather than exact duration.
• Offer recurrence: number of distinct observation windows under a stated event rule.
• Mechanic mix: share of observed offers by mechanic within a stated panel and period.
• Placement rate: eligible observations where the offer appeared in a named surface.

Do not turn “not observed” into “not running”. State failed checks, inaccessible accounts and unavailable restaurants.

Common promotion-tracking mistakes

Treating one screenshot as a campaign

A screenshot proves that an offer was visible under one set of conditions at one time. It does not establish breadth or duration.

Calling “not seen” the same as “not running”

The offer may depend on customer eligibility, location, time or platform. Preserve the observation conditions.

Mixing discounts with sponsored visibility

An offer and its placement are separate facts. Use Getplace's restaurant visibility tracking method for organic and sponsored rank, top-N presence and location-by-time visibility.

Calculating coverage without a denominator

Always state how many eligible restaurants or platforms were successfully checked. A percentage without that denominator is not useful.

Claiming ROI from competitor observations

Public market observation cannot show a competitor's spend, incremental sales or profit. It can identify a pattern that deserves further investigation.

What promotion tracking can and cannot answer

Promotion tracking can show the offer mechanic, visible eligibility, observed breadth, platform, placement and time window in a defined panel. It can help teams compare their own activity with the market and spot cases for review.

It cannot establish why a competitor launched the campaign, whether every customer could access it, or whether the campaign made money. Those conclusions require additional evidence.

For broader price and offer history, review Getplace's restaurant pricing intelligence. For a wider explanation of pricing, coverage and visibility measures, see restaurant delivery analytics.

Frequently asked questions

How often should competitor promotions be checked?

Choose a cadence that can observe the shortest material offer and supports the team's response window. Frequent short offers need more frequent checks than quarterly market reviews.

Should delivery fees count as a restaurant promotion?

Only when the fee itself is explicitly discounted or waived. Record the regular fee, promotional fee and eligibility separately.

How should promotion duration be calculated?

Use first seen and last seen as observation bounds unless the exact campaign dates are displayed or continuously verified.

Can sponsored placements be compared with promotions?

Yes, but as separate dimensions. A promotion may coincide with sponsored placement, yet that does not show how the platform ranked the restaurant or what caused performance to change.

Build the observation before judging the campaign

A promotion tracker is useful when another reviewer can reproduce what was seen, where it was seen and under which conditions. That evidence supports a clear market comparison while keeping claims about intent and impact within their limits.

About the evidence

This is a method-led guide. Relevant Denis posts were used to identify practical fields and questions, but their figures and brand conclusions were excluded because the underlying datasets were unavailable. No market-wide promotion rate or campaign outcome is claimed.

Sources

• Getplace restaurant pricing intelligence
• Getplace restaurant visibility tracking
• Restaurant delivery analytics