Tunnel = a 1-mile stretch of road you choose, which other businesses can also choose. Zone = a neighborhood-sized area of about 0.28 square miles, one business per hexagon. Background = the whole member network, no geography limit. Full glossary
Veteran-owned. Jacksonville-based. Fixed rate per verified delivery. No auction, no Middleman Tax.
Jacksonville restaurants market data
The product
WilDi Maps is not a single flat-rate product. You pick the tier that matches how local you need to be. All three are GPS-verified and charged per qualifying acknowledgment, with no auction, no exchange rake, no Middleman Tax.
1-mile road strip
Premium
Hyper-local, just-in-time
Choose a one-mile stretch of road; other businesses can choose the same road. When a member enters the strip, they get a just-in-time message, perfect for emergency services, on-route specials, and anything where being right there now beats brand awareness later.
Best for
0.28-square-mile area
Premium
Hyper-local, area-based
Choose a neighborhood hexagon of about 0.28 square miles, not tied to a single road. One business per hexagon. Catches the residential cluster, retail district, or industrial park where your work actually lives. Same just-in-time delivery as tunnels; different geometry.
Best for
City-wide rotation
From $0.25
per verified delivery, tier-based
City-wide brand presence on rotation. Highest reach for the budget; best when familiarity beats precision. The rate per verified delivery drops by tier (Enterprise: $0.25 / Pro: $0.32 / Local: $0.40 / Starter: $0.50). See /pricing for the live rate card.
Best for
What the member can do with your message
If the member wants to act on the message, Get directions opens turn-by-turn directions to the advertiser's location.
Click-through to any URL: ordering page, brand site, blog post, lead form.
Open a specific page inside the WilDi app: promo details, daily specials, how to redeem a special.
See the full pricing breakdown on the pricing page.
The honest channel breakdown, not vendor pitches. Numbers below are public benchmarks, sourced inline. Each channel has a job; the question is which one reaches the customers you need at a price that lets you stay profitable.
| Channel | Cost range | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Google Search Ads | $2.05 avg CPC · $30.57 cost per lead (Restaurants and Food) | WordStream's 2026 benchmark, medians from 13,474 US search campaigns, Apr 2025 to Mar 2026, minimum 52 campaigns per subcategory. One of the cheapest categories per click, but intent is leaky: most 'restaurants near me' searches resolve inside Google Maps without a paid click, and a 'lead' here is a menu view or a direction request, not a booked table. National and auction-priced; no qualifying source publishes Jacksonville-specific CPC or CPL. WordStream Google Ads Benchmarks 2026 (Apr 2025 to Mar 2026) |
| Meta (Facebook and Instagram) lead ads | $1.92 avg CPC · $27.66 cost per lead (all industries, leads campaigns) | WordStream's Facebook benchmark publishes no row for this vertical, so the all-industries leads figure is shown and labelled as exactly that. Leads-objective campaigns only, Apr 2024 to Jun 2025; Facebook cost per lead rose 20.94% year over year. WordStream Facebook Ads Benchmarks 2025 (all industries) |
| Delivery apps (DoorDash, Uber Eats) | A percentage of every delivery order, set by the plan tier you pick, plus payment processing | The commission is a share of the ticket, charged again on every reorder, and the app owns the customer relationship and the order data. No source in our registry publishes the current per-plan commission rates, so no percentage appears here: read the rate card in your own merchant agreement, because it is the number that decides whether delivery volume is profitable for you. No qualifying source publishes delivery-app commission rates |
| Yelp Ads | Budget-based cost per click. Yelp publishes no cost per lead. | Pay-per-click against diners already comparing you to the restaurant next door in the same interface. Strong for capture, weak for demand creation. Yelp does not publish a per-click or per-lead price for the dining category, so no dollar figure appears here. Yelp for Business, advertising |
| Direct mail (USPS Every Door Direct Mail) | $0.260 per piece in postage; printing is extra and quoted by your printer | USPS's own EDDM Retail rate, flat regardless of piece size up to 3.3 ounces, effective July 12, 2026. All-in per-piece figures that include printing come from printers rather than USPS, so we show only the postage half. Still works for grand openings and family-dense ZIPs like Mandarin and Nocatee, but it is one-shot exposure: the piece lands once, usually mid-day, far from the dinner decision. USPS Every Door Direct Mail Retail pricing |
| Static billboards (Jacksonville) | $3 to $10 CPM nationally (executed contracts); Jacksonville blended traditional-billboard CPM $5 to $12; static bulletins $1,800 to $6,500 and posters $800 to $2,200 per 4-week flight, production $400 to $1,400 extra (AdQuick 2026 guide) | No Jacksonville operator publishes a rate card, so the local figure is a marketplace listing and labelled secondary; the national range is from executed contracts. Impressions follow Geopath's definition: gross exposures including passengers and duplicated views, not people, and not people deciding where to eat tonight. Solomon Partners / OAAA 2025 CPM comparison; AdQuick Jacksonville listing; Geopath glossary |
| Digital billboards (Jacksonville) | Freeway digital bulletins $5 to $12 CPM (share of voice $3,000 to $12,000 per unit per month); downtown LEDs $12 to $22, JAX airport $15 to $28, programmatic exchange $4 to $11 (AdQuick Q2 2026 marketplace rates); self-serve plays from $0.01 per ~8-second play | A digital board rotates advertisers, typically 8 seconds of exposure every 64 to 80 seconds, so your exposure is a fraction of the board's traffic. Marketplace ranges are asking prices; the per-play price is the only platform-published billboard price that exists. AdQuick Jacksonville DOOH listing; Blip pricing |
| WilDi Maps: Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD) | From $0.25 (background, tier-based); tunnels and zones priced for hyper-local | Your message, such as your existing lunch or dinner special, reaches participating WilDi members on their phones as they pass through the Jacksonville road or neighborhood you chose. It waits in their inbox until they are safely parked or stopped. You pay only for verified deliveries, which are qualifying acknowledgments: the member later taps the WilDi button and the acknowledgment passes the billing rules. Using your special is separate. Recommended for restaurants: a tunnel on the drive-home road past your block, plus background rotation for city-wide recall. No auction, no per-order commission, no Middleman Tax. WilDi Maps pricing |
The pricing model
Cost Per Verified Delivery (CPVD) is a pricing model where you pay a tier-based rate (from $0.25) for each verified delivery, which is a qualifying acknowledgment: your message reaches a participating WilDi member's phone in the road or area you chose, the member taps the WilDi button to acknowledge it, and the acknowledgment passes the billing rules. WilDi checks the phone's reported location against your chosen area when the message is delivered. Not an impression, not a click, not a redemption or a visit.
CPVD replaces auction-based CPM (cost per thousand impressions) and CPC (cost per click), the pricing models where, on the ad industry's own benchmark, less than half of a programmatic dollar becomes a qualified impression (45.1%, with 27.2% going to transaction fees: ANA Programmatic Transparency Benchmark, Q2 2026, all environments, via Fiducia). That gap is the Middleman Tax. No exchanges, no demand-side platforms, no supply-side platforms, no resellers. One fixed rate, one verified delivery, one operator on the other end.
Read the full breakdown of where every dollar of an ad budget actually goes: What is the Middleman Tax?
Also known as ad platform fees. What is the Middleman Tax?
Same budget. Follow where the dollars actually go. Pick your vertical for a personalized waste estimate, or leave it on Average for the industry-wide baseline.
That's $30,000 per year. Here's where every dollar ends up:
What you put in
27% taken by SSPs and DSPs before an ad runs
26% on made-for-advertising sites, unmeasurable and non-viewable placements, and bots
47% of what you put in
Same budget, same ambition
Fixed verified human delivery · no auction
100% of your budget, a known quantity
$15,870 stops flowing to middlemen. 93,744 WilDi verified deliveries instead.
Priority Access to Jacksonville pilot zone and tunnel coverage. Background brands can use the Phase 1 Jacksonville rollout now as we start expanding.
Baseline Middleman Tax is anchored to the ANA Programmatic Media Supply Chain Transparency Study: Complete Report (Association of National Advertisers, December 5, 2023), which found that transaction costs, primarily DSP and SSP fees, account for 29 percent of the ad dollar, and that only 36 cents of every dollar entering a DSP effectively reaches the consumer once invalid traffic, non-viewable impressions and made-for-advertising sites are counted. Per-vertical estimates are not pure fee figures: they blend that fee skim with WordStream cost-per-click benchmarks and DoubleVerify invalid-traffic rates. Full methodology and sources →
The neighborhoods below are picked for dining patterns, not housing age: established dining districts, family suburbs with weeknight takeout demand, and the beach corridor. Each card says why, so you can match a road or area to where your diners already go for lunch and dinner.
Established dining district on the Hendricks Avenue corridor. Dense evening commute traffic passes independent restaurants on the drive home, the exact decision window for 'where are we eating tonight'.
The King Street and Park Street dining strips draw young professionals with high dine-out frequency and strong social-referral behavior.
Beach dining corridor with heavy weekend traffic on 3rd Street (A1A). Locals and day-trippers both pass through one predictable strip.
St. Johns Town Center retail gravity puts heavy daily traffic next to the densest cluster of sit-down restaurants in the metro. Standing out here is a visibility problem, not a quality problem.
Family-suburb stock with reliable weeknight takeout and family-dinner demand; the household-of-four repeat customer that carries a neighborhood restaurant.
Fast-growing young families with new-household dining habits still forming. The first restaurants a new resident tries become the defaults.
Honest take
WilDi isn't the right answer for every restaurant ad budget. A few honest cases where other channels still pencil out:
If the entire business lives inside the delivery apps and there is no door for a customer to walk through, app-native placement and app search ads are the demand channel that matches the fulfillment model. CPVD is built for businesses people can drive to; a ghost kitchen has no door to send them to.
A restaurant whose covers are mostly visitors booking from hotels converts better through travel-review placement and hotel-concierge relationships than through repeated exposure to local commuters. Locals are WilDi's strength; a one-visit tourist audience is not.
When the franchisor mandates that ad dollars flow through a national co-op buy, the local operator often is not free to redirect budget. CPVD only helps the operator who controls their own marketing spend.
Search ads for the restaurants and food category run $2.05 per click and $30.57 per lead nationally (WordStream Google Ads Benchmarks 2026, medians from 13,474 US search campaigns, Apr 2025 to Mar 2026), which at a 25–50% close rate implies roughly $61–$122 per acquired diner, and a 'lead' there is usually a menu view rather than a booked table. Delivery apps take a percentage of every order instead, set by the plan in your merchant agreement. Direct mail costs $0.260 per piece in USPS EDDM postage before printing. WilDi Maps' Cost Per Verified Delivery starts from $0.25 per verified delivery on background rotation, with tunnels and zones priced higher for hyper-local precision.
Dinner is decided in the car. The 5-7 pm drive home is the single densest 'where are we eating' decision window of the day, and it happens on a handful of predictable corridors: Hendricks Avenue through San Marco, Beach Boulevard, 3rd Street at the beaches, San Jose through Mandarin. A tunnel is a one-mile stretch of road you choose on WilDi; more than one business can run a tunnel on the same road. Participating WilDi members driving through it receive your message, such as tonight's dinner special, in their inbox, ready to read once they are parked, minutes from your door. That is the moment of decision, not an impression served at 2 am.
Cost Per Verified Delivery is WilDi Maps' pricing model. You pay a fixed, published price per verified delivery, starting from $0.25 on background. A verified delivery is a qualifying acknowledgment: a participating WilDi member receives your message in the area or on the road you chose and taps the WilDi button to acknowledge it. Tunnels (1-mile road strips, which several businesses can share) and zones (about 0.28-square-mile areas, one business per area) are priced higher for hyper-local precision. Acknowledging is not a redemption, a visit or a purchase, and a delivery is not a lead. No auction and no Middleman Tax.
They are different units, and the difference compounds. A delivery app takes a share of every order, charged again on every reorder, and keeps the customer data. A WilDi verified delivery costs a fixed published rate once, from $0.25 on background, and puts your message in a nearby member's inbox, ready to read once they are parked. Any walk-in customer who follows is yours: full-margin ticket, your loyalty program, your repeat business. Delivery apps rent you demand; a road or area you choose helps build it. Run the arithmetic with your own commission rate and your own average ticket, since we do not publish either figure for you.
They are cheap but leaky. Restaurant clicks run about $2.05 on the WordStream 2026 benchmark, among the lowest of any category, because most dining intent resolves inside Google Maps without a paid click. A paid 'lead' is usually a menu view or a direction request, not a booked table, and the searcher is comparison-shopping every restaurant in the map pack at once. Google is worth keeping for brand-name searches. The gap it cannot fill is reaching the person two blocks away at 5:45 pm who is already driving and has not searched anything yet. That is the moment a WilDi message reaches.
Background ads have no area limit by default, so they can deliver anywhere member coverage is active, and for most restaurants you should use the optional area limit: pick one area (your city, or your side of town) and delivery stops the moment they leave it. A neighborhood restaurant in San Marco gains nothing from a delivery to someone vacationing out of state, and the area limit keeps every dollar of budget on people who can actually walk through the door this week. Pair the limited background with a tunnel on your dinner-commute corridor.
Yes. In an April 2026 pilot with a sports bar in San Marco, people received a WilDi message while out and about, later visited a place they had never been to, and posted about the visit on their own social channels, unprompted. We quote those posts on our Maps page in the words they wrote, and we do not name the host business. That is the proof model we care about: not impression counts, but a real person who got the message and later walked through the door.
Background has no area limit by default, so it can deliver anywhere member coverage is active, or you limit it to one area you choose (your city, your side of town) so budget is never spent outside it. Coverage is built one place at a time and we will tell you where and when it exists. A zone is a neighborhood-sized area held by one business at a time: while it is yours, no competitor can run there. A tunnel is a one-mile stretch of road you can place anywhere, and it follows the road's contours, ideal for the approach to your shop or a route your customers already drive.
The Starter tier opens with a $50 deposit, and that deposit becomes your campaign funds. Background messages on Starter cost $0.50 per qualifying acknowledgment (formally, a verified delivery), so the first deposit pays for 100 qualifying acknowledgments from real local people. There is no auction and no platform fee stacked on top.
A verified delivery is a qualifying acknowledgment. Your message reaches the phone of one real person who was physically inside your chosen geography at that moment (GPS on the device itself confirms the location), and that person taps the WilDi button to acknowledge it. If the acknowledgment passes our billing rules, it is a verified delivery, and it is the only thing you are billed for. A message that reaches a phone but is never acknowledged is never billed. An acknowledgment is not a redemption, a visit, a purchase or proof of attention. Bots, background tabs, and off-screen impressions cannot generate one.
Four public tiers: Starter ($50 minimum deposit, background only), Local ($250, up to 2 tunnels and 1 zone), Pro ($1,000, up to 8 tunnels and 5 zones), and Enterprise ($3,000, up to 25 tunnels and 15 zones). Background rates per qualifying acknowledgment step down by tier, from $0.50 on Starter to $0.25 on Enterprise. An Agency tier is available through sales.
About this analysis
Written by Timm, founder of WilDi Maps · Jacksonville-based · Veteran-owned. We run our own delivery mesh in this market and hold ourselves to the same numbers we publish.
More about WilDi MapsPriority Access is open to the Jacksonville pilot cohort. Fixed rate. No auction. No bidding. No Middleman Tax.
