Zomato vs. Swiggy: Who Can Deliver?

The food delivery industry is booming with an increasing selection of restaurants offering their meals through online services and apps. The Indian arena is seeing increased website traffic with record-breaking order numbers.

Whether you’re interested in entering the food delivery arena or eager to understand any other industry on the planet, it’s essential to fully grasp your marketplace, partners, competitors, and the most prominent players in the game. Using Similarweb Research Intelligence, you can learn about your target market, spot the trends, and make informed decisions for your business.

Key Takeaways

• The Indian food delivery industry suffered a downturn at the beginning of the pandemic, in June 2019, but website traffic has increased year-over-year (YoY) ever since.
• While zomato.com received more website traffic in June 2022, swiggy.com had more page visits, longer durations, and lower bounce rates.
• Swiggy.com searched for new partnerships and employees to expand its market share in June 2022.
• Swiggy.com invested more into its paid-per-click (PPC) strategy to develop and grow its market share.
• Zomato is winning in the app arena with a better install penetration, more downloads, and more unique installs than Swiggy.

Food delivery beginnings

The business of food delivery has been around for over a century. The first delivery took place in Naples, Italy, in 1889 when King Umberto and Queen Margherita ordered the owner of the Pizzeria di Pietro e Basta Cosi to deliver them a pizza pie. They enjoyed their meal, and food delivery – as well as the Margherita pizza – was born.

But it was only the following year that this model became a business when a Bombay (now Mumbai), Indian businessman launched a lunch delivery service that provided food for blue-collar workers all over the city every day. It’s only fitting, therefore, that we return to where the business began.

In today’s market, with technological advancements, mobile apps, and after a pandemic lockdown, the setting has adapted and created opportunities for newcomers to rise through the ranks and take a larger share of the market.

India’s food delivery industry overview

The Indian food delivery industry suffered an initial downturn when the pandemic first hit in 2020. Website traffic saw a colossal decline of 57.65% YoY from June 2019 to June 2020, when consumers had concerns regarding food contamination and safety protocols.

Once COVID-19 safety regulations started to take effect, the industry started to turn back around and has seen an increase in website traffic YoY since. The food delivery industry has seen several enhancements as more restaurants made their meals available for online ordering, and consumers moved towards more expensive orders to enjoy at home.

June 2022 seemed to be a slow month for the industry as all except one of the top ten websites in India saw a month-over-month (MoM) decrease in traffic. Eatsure.com, however, saw a rise of almost 15% in traffic. This increase isn’t surprising, as eatsure.com is Rebel Foods’ rebranded name for the known and trusted Faasos, which is making its way back up the website traffic list.

At the top of the traffic food chain, fighting neck and neck for the first place, are zomato.com and swiggy.com, India’s food delivery behemoths, with 9.32 and 9.28 million monthly visits for June 2022, respectively. While zomato.com won slightly more traffic, the visits to swiggy.com seemed to be from a more loyal and engaged audience. This is indicated by the higher return rates, visit durations, page visits, and a lower bounce rate.

Which is better: Swiggy or Zomato?

That’s a question on many people’s minds, according to our keyword analysis. But the answer depends on many factors and a history of events.

Zomato opened its digital doors in July 2008 in Gurgaon, India, and Swiggy joined the marketplace six years later in July 2014 in Bangalore, India. Since then, swiggy.com has steadily increased its website traffic, cultivating a friendly rivalry between the two for years. They’ve even taken this competition public, sharing their successes on social media as part of their brand-building operations.

2021’s New Year’s Eve saw both companies breaking their records in food orders, proving that there’s still room for growth in the market. Zomato came in first with over 2.5 million orders in one day, and Swiggy achieved over 2 million orders. The two CEOs took to the social media “streets” to celebrate:

OMG! 2 million orders! First time in a single day. Three more hours to go… https://x.com/ahODGjXWdFpic.x.com/2omWRQSRve

— Deepinder Goyal (@deepigoyal) December 31, 2021

taking a tweet break. crossed 2 million orders on Swiggy and many more lined up. brb!

— Swiggy (@Swiggy) December 31, 2021

So how did we get here?

Back in pre-pandemic 2018, we checked in on the two food delivery giants, and unlike today, zomato.com was the clear leader in website traffic.

However, zomato.com also offered services unrelated to food delivery, and when we compared only the food delivery segment of zomato.com against swiggy.com, it was swiggy.com that came out on top.

Fast forward two years and swiggy.com has reduced the gap with zomato.com’s total website traffic, even surpassing zomato.com for the month of May 2021.

What has swiggy.com changed over the last two years, to close that gap? A closer look into the company’s marketing decisions can reveal a few critical maneuvers. The takeaway here is it’s important to analyze the marketing channels bringing in the most traffic, and where companies allocated their marketing budget.

Breaking down traffic into segments allows us to have a more accurate apples-to-apples comparison between Swiggy and Zomato. While swiggy.com offers only food delivery, zomato.com delivers a range of services. We’ve used Similarweb’s segment analysis feature to group the food delivery function of zomato.com.

When comparing swiggy.com vs. zomato.com’s food delivery segment, swiggy.com has a clear lead.

Over the last two years, swiggy.com grabbed 62.02% of the two’s shared website traffic and 73.57 million visits. Zomato.com reached more unique visitors, indicating a newer audience, but swiggy.com’s audiences are more engaged. Swiggy.com’s visits attain a higher page count, longer visit durations, and a lower bounce rate than zomato.com.

Growth by traffic source

Comparing the traffic by marketing channels can reveal insights into the brands’ different strategies.

Swiggy.com drove more visits through direct traffic than zomato.com in June 2022 with 69.72% vs. 52.46% direct visits. Swiggy.com maintained its number from June 2021, when direct traffic drove 70.42% of traffic. Zomato.com, however, lost almost 7% of its direct traffic, YoY.

What zomato.com lost in direct traffic, it made up for in organic search, which brought in 44.80% of traffic, an increase of over 12% YoY. This was twice as much as swiggy.com’s 21.92% share, indicating that zomato.com invested in a careful SEO strategy.

Swiggy.com invested more in paid search than the previous year, bringing in 5.38% of traffic in June 2022 vs. 3.84% in June 2021. Zomato.com, on the other hand, almost dropped its paid search completely, bringing in only 0.13% of traffic in June 2022 vs. 5.71% of traffic a year earlier.

So while both websites enjoy a large percentage of direct traffic, swiggy.com invested more in paid search than zomato.com, while the latter invested most of its efforts in increasing organic search.

This is the kind of crucial information you can uncover when doing a digital competitive analysis of your marketplace. An analysis enables you to understand what works for other companies and use that information to enhance your marketing strategy and grow your market share.

Paid search terms as a development strategy

In the digital age, the right keywords can make or break your marketing campaign. They can even aid in the development and direction of your company.

The general rule is that the more you invest, the more clicks you achieve when it comes to PPC search terms. Researching and choosing effective keywords is critical for this equation to work. It’s vital to choose the keywords that can capture the audience that searches for your product, location, and brand.

In June 2022, zomato.com’s paid keyword terms mainly targeted the different restaurants and cuisines they offered on their website. During the same month, swiggy.com took a different approach, with branded terms such as “swiggy partner,” “swiggy partner login,” and “swiggy offers” to attract new vendors and customers.

The previous year, in June 2021, zomato.com targeted similar keywords in their paid strategy. This suggests that they can benefit from optimizing their keyword strategy. Swiggy.com, however, had a very different paid keyword strategy last year, with many terms targeting specific cities where you can order their food deliveries.

This change in keywords suggests that swiggy.com has a carefully calculated paid search strategy, wherein last year they wanted to expand into new niche markets, and this year they want to add more partners and restaurants to the business.

Incoming traffic for swiggy.com paid search terms, Jun 2021 vs. June 2022

Swiggy vs. Zomato: keyword knockout

Another effective keyword strategy, be it cheeky, is to target your competitor’s audience. We used Similarweb’s keyword generator to see which terms the competing companies were using.

Over the last two years, 616 organic and paid search terms that included the word “swiggy” drove almost 93,000 visits to zomato.com. At the same time, 837 terms with the word “zomato” drove nearly 219,000 visits to swiggy.com. Zomato.com paid for 12.5% of the keywords, whereas swiggy.com paid for 17.7%.

Swiggy.com has taken the reigns and continued to invest in paid search. Swiggy.com increased its budget for paid search in June 2022 and drove almost 12,800 visits to swiggy.com instead of the 4,132 visits in June 2021, an increase of 209.8%, YoY. Zomato.com, on the other hand, decreased its investment to virtually nothing and brought in only 832 visits from paid searches in June 2022. This number was even less than the previous year, which brought in 1855 visits.

Food delivery Android app installations

In today’s food delivery market, mobile apps are crucial to offering a friendly experience that creates a loyal customer base. Therefore, we can’t have an accurate comparative analysis between Zomato and Swiggy without understanding their app engagement strategies. We used Similarweb’s ​​mobile app intelligence to compare Zomato and Swiggy.

Back in 2018, Zomato had two separate apps for ordering food; the “Zomato – Restaurant Finder and Food Delivery App” and the “Zomato Order – Food Delivery App.” Two apps might have created a confusing experience for customers, as the two apps combined still had a slower adoption rate than the “Swiggy Food Order & Delivery app”.

Zomato has streamlined its app experience since then by combining the two apps. The company now offers a single app for the food ordering market in India, the “Zomato: Food Delivery & Dining app”. It seems that this strategy has paid off, as it’s clear that the Zomato app has taken the lead in install penetration, downloads, and unique installs.

Between April and July 2018, both companies experienced a surge of around 4% in install penetration. In the last 12 months, however, the penetration rate slowed down, yet both apps have seen steady increases, every month.

The numbers of downloads and unique installs for both apps have endured a more volatile journey. Both apps’ downloads gradually declined during the second half of 2021 but then experienced a small uptick in January 2022. This could be due to the third COVID-19 wave in India, which prompted an uptake in food orders as many restaurants around the country shut their doors.

The following month, however, both Zomato App and Swiggy App experienced their lowest numbers of downloads and unique installs. Both apps stopped offering discounts once the demand for food delivery surged, which might account for the decrease in app numbers.

Unique installs dropped for Zomato App from 3.8M in July 2021 to 3.1M in June 2022 (-18.4%). Meanwhile, Swiggy App installs grew from 2.0M in July 2021 to 2.5M in June 2022, an increase of 20%.

Final thoughts

Whether you’re a restaurant looking for a delivery service, or a delivery service looking to expand your market share, it is crucial to understand the leading companies in the Indian food delivery industry. Both Zomato and Swiggy invested in effective digital marketing strategies to expand their client base. Zomato has been more focused on increasing its mobile app numbers, whereas Swiggy invested more in paid search.

You can learn from the marketing strategies of the industry leader to win a bigger market share. Similarweb’s digital data can help you understand your market, learn about new opportunities and create a winning marketing strategy.