With deliveries under 15 minutes and app designs engineered for impulse purchases, consumers on Quick Commerce platforms show up with clear intent and urgency.

And the numbers prove it. While traditional digital ad platforms struggle to cross a 1% conversion rate, QCom has 2–3x better odds of turning views into sales. This is largely because shoppers here aren’t browsing—they’re ready to buy.

Add to that the fast inventory turnover (often 8–10x for categories like beverages, snacks, and personal care), and you’ve got a space that’s fertile ground for fast-growing D2C brands—if ad spends are used wisely.

But that’s the catch.

Despite the high intent, many brands still burn through budgets without meaningful returns. Let’s say you’re running a campaign. You spend, say, ₹2,00,000, get 1,000 clicks, and only 10 conversions. That’s a 1% impression-to-conversion rate. Clearly, something’s off—your targeting, creative, or product fit might not be aligned.

Maybe your Click-Through Rate is sitting at 0.80%, well below the 2–3% benchmark. Or your Cost Per Acquisition is ₹3,000 for a product where margins don’t support it.

These numbers aren’t just vanity metrics—they're signposts. Many brands do spend heavily on ads—but here’s the disconnect: they often fail to map that spend back to where and how their products are showing up. Ranking, relevance, and placement matter as much as the bid itself, if not more. Wasted ad spend often stems from:

• Bidding on high-volume keywords without validating organic rank across locations
• Overlapping paid and organic placements that cannibalize performance
• Advertising SKUs which have had low fill rates or have competitors outpricing them
• Ignoring limited screen real estate and user scrolling habits

Here’s the kicker: your ad rank isn’t always working in your favor—even when you're paying. Just showing up in search results isn’t enough. Placement, relevance, and ranking all shape what the customer sees first—and whether they act. Most users only engage with the first 5–6 tiles, meaning anything below the fold is often ignored. That’s where strategy matters. You might be spending to appear, but if your ads show up below the scroll line or get outshined by smarter bundles or better-priced SKUs, then you’re paying for presence, not performance.

And your ad rupees aren't working as hard as they should.

And we’re not talking small numbers here:

In fact, $71.37 billion in global digital ad spend was expected to be wasted in 2024—a staggering jump from previous years. That’s over $195 million every single day, often lost to ads that don’t convert due to fraudulent traffic (clicks from bots, accidental taps, or non-human users that eat up budgets without delivering results), poor placement, irrelevant targeting, or mismanaged bidding strategies. And while this is a global crisis, the impact is even sharper on high-intent platforms like Quick Commerce, where every impression counts.

So what do you do?

1. Don’t Let Paid Rank Fall Below Organic

This one’s a silent killer. If your paid ad shows up lower than your organic listing, you’re essentially paying to lose visibility. Track these mismatches and course-correct quickly—because if you're spending to show up worse, that's wasted money.

2. Why pay for visibility you already own? 

Take a look at this Bru example on Blinkit: the 100g SKU ranks organically in the top 5 for the keyword “coffee”—without any paid support. Smartly, Bru runs an ad on its 200g SKU instead. The result? Increased shelf visibility, better screen real estate, and no wasted spend cannibalizing organic traffic.

Pro tip: Use paid to expand your presence, not duplicate it. Reallocate that budget to keywords where you're not ranking well—and make every ad rupee count.

3. Unlock Growth with Smart Bundles

Bundling isn’t just about deals—it’s a discovery strategy. Take this real example from Blinkit: when a user searches for pizza base, only the first ad slot shows an actual pizza base. The second? Pizza cheese. The third and fourth? Pizza sauce. This cross-category bundling taps into the user’s intent and completes the meal in their mind. The takeaway? Strategic bundling doesn’t just boost basket size—it turns search into a story and drives impulse-driven discovery.

The bottom line? Quick Commerce isn’t just a distribution channel—it’s becoming a media channel.

The platforms themselves know this, and they’re capitalizing on it. Blinkit saw a nearly 4x jump in ad revenue, crossing ₹400 crore in FY 2023–24, with annual run rate soaring past ₹1,000 crore earlier this year. Zepto isn’t far behind, already clocking an annualized ad revenue run-rate of ₹1,000 crore. That’s not just brands spending—it’s platforms monetizing intent-rich real estate.

So the question isn’t “should we spend on QCom?”—it’s how are we ensuring that spend translates into visibility, rank, and conversion? Because brands that treat QCom like a traditional ad platform will continue to bleed budgets.

The winners? They’re the ones who treat visibility like currency, optimize for performance—not just presence—and use data to align creative, inventory, and spend. 

In a scroll economy driven by urgency and limited real estate, strategy isn’t a nice-to-have—it’s a growth lever.

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