What the ads say

Gousto’s Meta ads sell convenience and value: dinners ready in minutes, pre-measured ingredients, meals from £3.20 a portion, and 50% off plus free delivery on the first box. A newer strand launches Heat & Eat, a range of chef-designed ready meals, first in June and again in September as an expanded range. The recipe choice appears two ways, as over 500 recipes and 25 ranges a month or as 175+ recipes a week.

On Google, the Ads Transparency Center lists about 300 ads for gousto.co.uk in the UK, about 200 of them text ads. Two of the text ads we read spell out the whole offer: 50% off the first box, 40% off the second, and 20% off all other orders in the first two months.

Where they send people

Every Meta link we followed carries a promo code, and the site picks it up: it checks the code with Gousto’s own promo service and puts it in the basket, so nobody types anything. The general ads land on the homepage, which opens with the offer as a ladder, 50%, 40% and then 20% off, next to a price per meal with its footnote. Some Heat & Eat ads land on a page built for the range, with the offer in its first paragraph. Others, including the September ones, land on the homepage, where Heat & Eat is one tile under What’s new.

What works

  • Codes that apply themselves. The discount travels in the link, so the offer survives the click without a code to remember.
  • A page for the new range. Heat & Eat has its own landing page, headed with the range and the offer.
  • Promises the operation keeps. One ad asks people to sign up by Sunday midday for a Monday box, which fits the site’s own next-day rules.
  • Terms in the ad. Several ads say new customers only and that surcharge items are excluded, before anyone clicks.
  • The full offer on Google. The search ads carry the whole ladder, not just the headline number.

The gaps we’d close

  1. One offer, three descriptions. The Meta ads we read mention only the first box. The homepage adds 40% off the second box and 20% off the third to eighth. The Heat & Eat page, the Google ads and the voucher message Gousto’s site loads for these codes say 20% off all other orders in the first two months. For a weekly box, eight boxes and two months come out close. For anyone who skips weeks, orders fortnightly or adds an extra box, they don’t.
  2. Two starting prices on one page. The Heat & Eat page’s FAQ says prices start at £3.09 a portion. The footnote on the same page, the homepage and the ads say £3.20.
  3. A link that drops its code. One Heat & Eat ad, running since 3 July, links with a slash encoded into the parameter name. The site reads it as a different parameter, never checks the code and leaves the basket empty of one, while the page still promises 50% off. We couldn’t see what checkout applies without signing up. What we could see is that the code never arrives, and Gousto’s codes look campaign-specific, so that ad’s trail ends at the click.
  4. Summer and brand-new, in late September. Two summer campaigns about warm evenings and time savers still run on Meta, and one Google text ad still carries a “Heatwave Ready” sitelink. Ads from June still introduce Heat & Eat as brand new, next to the September ads for the expanded range.

What we’d do next

  1. Tell the offer one way. Use the voucher’s own wording, the one checkout works from, on the homepage too. Then test the full ladder in the Meta ads against the first box alone; it’s a bigger offer than most of those ads say.
  2. One starting price. Update the FAQ or the footnote so the page gives a single figure.
  3. Check every final URL. A simple test that each ad’s link carries a promo code the site can read would have caught the broken one. Fix it and rerun the test whenever ads change.
  4. Retire the summer lines. Switch off the summer campaigns and the heatwave sitelink, move the June launch ads to the expanded-range copy, and send the newest Heat & Eat ads to the page built for them.

We can’t see Gousto’s results, so none of this is a verdict on performance. With account access, the first number we’d want is how many first boxes arrive with no promo code attached, split by ad.