Someone typing "pizza delivery near me" has already decided to buy pizza. The only question left is from whom. That is the highest-intent moment in the entire category, and it is contested: not mainly by other pizza shops, but by delivery marketplaces bidding aggressively on searches for your own restaurant name.
Before any other paid search activity, check what appears when someone searches your restaurant by name. In most markets you will find one or more marketplaces bidding on it. When a customer who intended to order directly from you clicks that ad, you keep the order and lose 15 to 30 points of margin on it.
Brand defence is usually the cheapest keyword you will ever buy, because your quality score on your own name is high and the click cost is low. It is also the highest-return paid search spend most independents have, and the one most frequently overlooked.
You are not bidding on your brand to acquire the customer. You are bidding to keep the margin on a customer you already had.
| Tier | Examples | Intent | Priority |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand | "[your name] pizza", "[your name] menu" | Already yours | Highest. Cheap, defensive, essential. |
| Category + local | "pizza delivery near me", "pizza [suburb]" | Very high, undecided | High. The core acquisition buy. |
| Product-specific | "deep dish [city]", "gluten free pizza near me" | High and qualified | High if you genuinely offer it well. |
| Occasion | "pizza catering", "office lunch delivery" | High value per order | High for catering programmes. |
| Competitor brand | Rival restaurant names | Mixed, expensive | Low. Usually poor economics and it invites retaliation. |
| Generic informational | "pizza recipe", "best pizza" | None | Do not buy. |
Restrict every campaign to the delivery polygon, using presence targeting rather than interest targeting so you do not pay for clicks from people researching your city from another country.
Schedule around opening hours and daypart demand. Paying for "pizza delivery near me" clicks at 2pm on a Tuesday when your kitchen is quiet and the searcher is browsing is a common, invisible drain. Weight bids toward the decision windows.
The most expensive mistake in restaurant paid search is spending real money on a high-intent click and landing it on a homepage. The customer wanted to order; make ordering the only thing on the page.
Location-specific landing page, correct store, ordering entry point above the fold, delivery time visible, no navigation to get lost in. The conversion difference between a homepage and a proper ordering landing page routinely halves the cost per order, which is a larger effect than any bid adjustment.
Track cost per completed order, not cost per click, and track it by store. Store-level differences are usually large, and they are informative: a store with a high cost per order relative to its neighbours normally has a delivery-time problem, a review-score problem, or an ordering page problem rather than a bidding problem.
Usually yes, if marketplaces or competitors are bidding on it. The organic listing does not protect you when a paid result sits above it. If nobody is bidding on your name, you can pause it and monitor, but check monthly, because it changes without warning.
Judge it against your contribution margin per order and your expected repeat rate, not against an industry benchmark. A first order that costs $9 to acquire is excellent if that customer typically returns four times, and poor if they never come back, which is why the second-order journey is what makes paid acquisition work.
They can work once you are feeding real conversion data back, and they are unforgiving when you are not. Start with tight manual control on brand and core local terms, get conversion tracking genuinely accurate, and only then let automation expand the buy.
Keep reading
The map pack, location pages, citations, proximity and the small set of things that actually move local rankings for a pizza shop.
Local & discoveryCategories, attributes, ordering links, photos, posts and Q&A: the profile settings that change how many orders a pizza shop gets.
Local & discoveryCutting friction out of direct ordering, because every point of conversion is worth more than any campaign, and every direct order is margin you keep.
ChannelsRunning Meta and TikTok for a delivery business: polygon targeting, creative that actually stops the scroll, and the three campaigns worth running.
marketing.pizza runs all of it, every night, across every store you have.