One ad fund. Every franchisee busy.

Structural fixes — removing overlap between territories, cutting queries that never book, pointing clicks at the right landing page — usually show inside the first month, because they change what you pay for immediately. Targets and bidding strategies need six to eight weeks of clean conversion data before they settle. We work to a cost per booked job rather than a cost per click, and against the $70.11 average cost per lead across Google Ads you will know quickly whether the money is buying real work.

With a framework, yes, and it usually strengthens the system. Owners know their town, their busy seasons and the offers that land there. What causes damage is unmanaged accounts bidding on the brand name, targeting a neighbour's territory, or running creative nobody has approved. The arrangement that works is a governed one: central control of brand terms, shared negatives and creative standards, with local spending flexibility and reporting everyone can see. Franchisees get their autonomy and the system stops paying twice for the same click.

By separating the layers and publishing the rule. The national layer carries name defence and category demand that no single owner should fund alone. The local layer is funded per territory and spent there, so a strong market is not quietly subsidising a weak one. Contributions and spend are reconciled openly, and where a market needs extra support we say that out loud and agree it rather than hiding it in a blended average. Most ad fund disputes are transparency problems before they are money problems.

A fixed monthly fee scoped to the number of territories and campaign complexity, quoted before anything starts and separate from media spend. We do not take a percentage of the ad fund, because that quietly rewards spending more rather than booking more. Setup and rebuild work is scoped once, and where the honest engagement is an audit and a territory map instead of a retainer, we scope it that way and say so. Ad accounts, conversion data and creative stay in the franchisor's name.

By drawing the account from the franchise agreements rather than the platform defaults. Every campaign is tied to a defined service area, radius targeting is set against real drive times instead of a round number, and boundary postcodes are assigned deliberately rather than left to whoever bids highest. Trademark terms are run centrally in one campaign, and shared negative lists stop a plumbing franchise in one suburb paying for clicks twenty miles away. We re-check overlap whenever a location opens, closes or changes hands.

It can, once search is efficient and conversion data is clean, and it needs guardrails. Automated campaigns are happy to serve outside the spirit of a territory map and to claim conversions that a well-run name campaign would have taken anyway. We introduce it after the structure is fixed, with location targeting tightened, brand traffic excluded where the platform allows, asset groups built per region, and a holdout comparison so the lift is judged honestly. Where it does not beat the alternative, we say so and put the budget back.

Call tracking per location, set up so the displayed number stays consistent with the business listing data search engines read. Forms, click-to-calls and booking events are tracked alongside, and where the point of sale or CRM supports it, we import the outcome back into the ad platform so bidding optimises toward booked jobs instead of raw enquiries. Then we review a sample of calls with the owners each month, because lead quality is a conversation, not a metric that arrives by itself.

They share market research and should share reporting. Paid tells you within days which local terms convert, which sharpens the organic roadmap; organic then takes over terms where clicks are punishing and holds them for years. In a mature local programme more than 70% of organic traffic and around half of organic-derived leads come from regular organic listings, so the two channels together lower blended cost per enquiry over time. We run both with our franchise SEO team on one plan and report blended cost per booked job per territory.

Yes, and we keep them completely separate from consumer campaigns — different audience, different funnel, different sales cycle, different reporting. Development campaigns are judged on qualified applications and cost per signed franchisee rather than on lead volume, because a cheap lead that never qualifies is the most expensive thing in the funnel. For scale: the 2025 AFDR reports an average cost per lead of $271 and an average cost per sale of $13,757, on an average recruitment media budget of $268,083.

It launches with its own campaign, funding and landing page rather than being folded into a neighbour's. Opening weeks are when local demand is curious and competition for the brand name is lowest, so we front-load spend, run an opening offer from the approved library, tighten targeting to the new service area, and check overlap with adjacent territories before the first click. The owner gets a short briefing on what is running, what it buys and what to expect, plus the launch checklist.

Very little should change for the customer, and that is the point. The campaign, the tracked number, the landing page and the conversion history belong to the territory rather than the individual owner, so the new franchisee inherits a working account instead of starting from a cold algorithm. We update the ownership details, hours, team and any local offers, brief the new owner on the reporting, and keep the historical data intact so the comparison stays honest.

No. Media spend buys media, and our fee is separate and fixed. Where a tool is genuinely needed — call tracking, a landing page platform, a reporting layer — we recommend it in writing with the cost stated, and it is bought on the brand's own account so access never depends on us. That rule occasionally costs us margin and it is the reason franchise clients let us near an ad fund in the first place.

One page per location, monthly, in language an owner reads between shifts: what was spent in their territory, how many calls and form enquiries came in, how many turned into booked work where we can see it, cost per booked job, and what we changed. Head office gets the same data rolled up with the national layer included and the outliers flagged. Nobody has to log into a dashboard, and if a market had a bad month the report says so before the franchisee has to ask.

Yes, and sometimes that is the sensible transition. We can rebuild the structure and run the national layer while an incumbent keeps a region, as long as territory boundaries, brand terms and negative lists are governed in one place — that is the part that must not be split. We will share the map, the standards and the reporting format openly with them. A phased handover across a couple of quarters is usually calmer for franchisees than one weekend of change.

Google search is the spine, and it is rarely the whole plan. Most systems also need paid social for openings and offers, retargeting so the people who compared three companies come back, and shopping or local inventory ads where products are involved. Some franchises benefit from Local Services Ads, which are priced per enquiry and sit above the usual results. We pick the mix per territory rather than applying one template, and we say plainly when a channel is not worth the management time.

Once properly, then locally. We build a master keyword set for the service category — the specific phrases people use when they are ready to book, the comparison searches, the problem searches — and validate it against real search data. Each territory then inherits that set with local modifiers, its own negatives, and any terms unique to that area: a regional word for the service, a nearby landmark, a competitor who only exists in one city. It is one framework applied at the level of each town, not a national list copied everywhere.

Governance. A general agency optimises an account; a franchise PPC agency has to keep hundreds of owners, one brand and one fund pulling in the same direction. That means account structures tied to legal service areas, creative approval that does not become a bottleneck, reporting written for franchisees as well as for head office, and the discipline to raise an uncomfortable finding at the annual meeting. The digital marketing craft is the same; the operating model around it is the job.