“Not eligible for ads”: what a UK restaurant should read into it
Restaurant operators take this personally. It is a calculation, and no one at the platform wrote it about you. Advertising and promotional eligibility on UK delivery platforms is derived from a small set of conditions, each with its own source and its own recovery time, and the status simply reports the result. Nobody wrote it about you. The productive response is not to appeal it but to work out which input is failing, because two of the usual suspects recover in weeks and one of them takes months.
What conditions produce it?
Hygiene rating, operational performance, availability and account standing. Only the first is published as a threshold, so read the order below as a diagnostic sequence and not as the platform’s own list.
Hygiene is the one with a public value you can check in a minute, and the one with the longest recovery. Deliveroo’s stated threshold for its Marketer programme is a rating that “must be 3 or more, or ‘Awaiting Inspection’/’Pass’/’Exempt'”.
Performance covers rejections, lateness and customer ratings, all visible in partner reporting.
Availability is whether the listing was orderable when it should have been, and it is the input with no report behind it.
Why does it appear without warning?
Eligibility is continuous, not periodic. Deliveroo puts it plainly: it may discontinue participation “at our sole option if at any time you do not meet our eligibility requirements”.
There is no review meeting and no notice period in that wording. A value crosses a line and the status follows. So the absence of a warning is not an oversight, it is how the mechanism is built.
How do I find out which input failed?
Check the cheap ones first, in this order, and stop when you find it.
Look up the site’s hygiene rating in the public register and compare it against the threshold. That takes a minute and resolves a large share of cases outright.
Then look at the operational metrics in your partner reporting for the last month against the month before. A step change there is usually obvious.
Then ask whether the site was actually orderable during its published hours, and notice that you probably cannot answer it. That is the gap, and closing it is what Kitchain (kitchain.co) is for, so that the third check costs the same thirty seconds as the first two.
Finally, ask the account manager. Do it last, with the other three answered, because a specific question gets a specific answer and a general one gets a callback.
How long until it comes back?
Depends entirely on which input failed, and the range is wide enough to change how you plan.
Hygiene is the slow one. A free re-inspection cannot happen until a three month standstill period has elapsed, and a rating below 5 then waits out a 21 day appeal window before publishing. Half a year is a realistic worst case.
Performance recovers over weeks of better numbers, with the platform deciding when enough has passed. Availability recovers immediately in the sense that the behaviour stops, though any rolling window a platform uses will take its own time to clear.
Is it worth chasing, or should I just spend the money elsewhere?
Chase it, because the alternative usually costs more than it saves.
Platform-funded and platform-promoted placement is not straightforwardly replaceable with your own spend, since it operates inside the app where the customer is already choosing. Redirecting the budget to social or search moves you into a different and more expensive competition.
The exception is a site whose eligibility is failing on hygiene and which has other reasons to be reviewed. There, the eligibility status is a symptom of something worth addressing on its own terms.
What should this change for the group?
One standing list: every site, its hygiene rating, its distance from the threshold, and its availability over the last quarter.
Most operators can produce the first two columns today and not the third. The third is the one that predicts this status appearing again next quarter on a different site.