Franchise PPC: How it Works and Unique Challenges of PPC Advertising

As a franchise business owner, you’re always on the lookout for innovative ways to grow your business, and PPC advertising is an excellent digital marketing strategy that can help you achieve your goals. With an average of 200% return on investment, franchise PPC services are the way to go if you want to see your corporation grow exponentially. 

The elements of a modern PPC campaign—targeted keywords, eye-catching headlines, and AI-driven strategies—are extremely effective in generating new leads when they’re partnered with a compelling landing page on your franchise’s website. Before investing in franchise PPC services, it’s important to know what you’re signing up for. In this article, we’re going to discuss what franchise PPC is, how it works, the benefits it offers, and a couple of unique challenges franchisors run into when running PPC campaigns. Keep reading to find out how franchise PPC can benefit your business, and how you can overcome common pitfalls of franchise PPC initiatives. 

What is Franchise PPC? 

Franchise pay-per-click (PPC) advertising is a digital marketing strategy that involves bidding for ad placements for the various business locations of a franchise business on platforms such as Google, Bing, Facebook, LinkedIn, Yelp, and Instagram, to name a few. With this form of advertising, franchises only pay when an individual clicks on the ads placed on a particular platform. Depending on the platform, ads will be displayed on search results pages (Ad or Sponsored section), websites, social media feeds, YouTube, and more depending on the platform you’re advertising on. Franchise PPC, or paid search ads, allow you to target specific users searching for keywords related to your franchised business’ location or service area.

If you’re unfamiliar with the world of digital marketing, franchise PPC can be confusing. We’re going to share a step-by-step process of how PPC advertising actually works. 

How Does Franchise PPC Work?

To place franchise PPC ads, franchisors or marketing agencies follow this simple process:

1. Create an advertising account with Google Ads or the desired platform to run ads on.
2. Decide who to target using keywords, demographics, and more.
3. Set the budget and how much you’re willing to pay for each click, website action, or sale.
4. Craft an ad with compelling text, images, or a creative video.
5. Add tracking tags to your website or upload offline customer data into the ad platform.
6. Send the ad into an auction with competitors who bid on the same keywords or audiences.
7. Pay each time someone clicks on your ad and measure the results through the platform’s key performance indicators.

Paid search ads allow franchises to target specific users searching for keywords related to a certain franchised business’ location or service area. When individuals search for services or products nearby, PPC ads provide much-needed exposure for nearby franchised business locations. 

Let’s say you own a franchised car dealership and decide to target a phrase such as “car dealership Salt Lake City” and use Google ads for that keyword. Your car dealership ad will likely appear at the top of the search results and above your competitors’ organic listings. The goal of franchise PPC advertising is to generate high-quality leads via a franchised business’ website, phone lines, or a contact form. With precise keyword placement and targeting techniques, PPC advertising can be a cost-effective marketing tool for franchises to reach new customers. 

4 Benefits of Investing in Franchise PPC Services

Paid search advertising boasts countless benefits for franchise owners. Let’s take a look at the top 4 benefits you’ll experience when you invest in franchise PPC marketing: 

1. Target Customers by Geography and Needs

Franchise PPC ad services allow you to reach a particular audience, based on hand-selected criteria known as targeting. You’ll have various targeting options available to you depending on the platform you choose to run ads on. For example, Google Ads enables you to target online users based on demographics (age, gender, household income), keywords (products, services, location), topics, and more. With multiple locations and different target markets, PPC ads’ customizability is especially important for franchised businesses. When you’re able to incorporate target market specifications such as the location of your franchised business, you won’t waste time reaching the wrong audience. 

2. PPC Ads Are Measurable

Compared to other marketing tactics, PPC advertising is extremely easy to track results. It’s highly unlikely you’ll know how many customers found you through a magazine ad. However, you can easily check how your PPC ads are performing and the results you’re getting from each advertising campaign. Google Ads makes your job easy with tracking metrics such as the number of clicks you’ve received (number of viewers who’ve clicked the ad), impressions (amount of people who’ve seen the ad), cost-per-click, cost-per-conversion (how much it costs you to generate a solid lead), and more. With this collected data, it’s easy to tweak campaigns that aren’t working and enhance your strategies for better results in the future. 

3. PPC Ads are Cost-Effective and Quick

With PPC ads, you get to decide how much in total you want to spend. You have control over your overarching paid digital marketing costs throughout each campaign. And the good news is that you only spend money when someone clicks on your ad! Not only is PPC advertising cost-effective, but it also drives fast results. In fact, you can start driving traffic to your website the day you start running a PPC campaign. As opposed to a more organic approach like SEO, paid search advertising is one of the quickest ways to increase online traffic for your franchise business. 

4. PPC Ads Compliment SEO Services

Franchise PPC ads and SEO are like bacon and eggs—they complement each other very well. If you run paid search campaigns alongside an SEO program, your franchised business will occupy increased screen space on the search engine results pages (SERPs). In our experience, businesses tend to see a higher click-through rate when both their ad and their organic listing appear at the same time on the SERPs. The end outcome is more online traffic and a boost in sales. While SEO focuses on unpaid (i.e., organic) search rankings that are long-lasting but take time and hard work to achieve, PPC ads complement SEO by providing almost immediate exposure. 

3 Unique Challenges of Franchise PPC

There are a couple of hurdles presented by franchise PPC, but they’re not impossible to overcome. Here are a few challenges franchisees face when running PPC campaigns as well as a few ways to successfully push past these obstacles: 

1. Overspending and Wasted Budget

Franchise businesses often have limited marketing budgets, and it’s essential to optimize your ad spend to maximize return on your investment. It’s common for franchisors to overspend or waste PPC ad budgets, leading to depleted funds without the desired results. To avoid overspending, it’s helpful to partner with an experienced and trustworthy marketing agency that provides PPC management services. 

2. Tracking Setup and Reporting

It’s easy to spend money with these platforms and to see if your ads are getting clicks, but are those clicks turning into store visits and sales? Many PPC platforms are designed to be self-service. However, setting up tracking properly to measure real results can be tricky if you don’t have a professional involved. Even if you have the data, is the data always readily available, easy to read, and actionable? This is one of the most common reasons we hear from businesses looking to switch agencies.

3. Managing Multiple Locations

One of the most significant challenges that franchises face with PPC marketing is the complexity of managing multiple locations. Each franchise location is usually run by different people and sometimes offers varying hours, products, or services. It’s important to send potential customers to individual franchised location pages instead of the franchise’s corporate site. To send potential customers to the right spot, it’s essential to understand how to manage PPC campaigns for different markets as the surroundings, customer requirements, and locations differ significantly. It’s difficult to manage multiple paid search campaigns for each franchised location, and it can be a frustrating experience for some franchised locations that face a lack of online engagement.

Overcome These Challenges With Rock Salt’s Franchise PPC Services

The best way to beat these franchise PPC challenges is to work with an experienced marketing team with years of success stories to tell. Rock Salt’s crew has successfully worked with countless franchise companies to optimize their PPC initiatives. With each client, we manage numerous Ad campaigns targeting distinct markets every month. With our franchise PPC services, you can finally engage with the target audience you’ve been struggling to connect with. Don’t waste your budget on failed or outdated paid search strategies, and don’t let your franchise get lost in the online shuffle of your competitors. From the get-go, we provide you with weekly reporting on performance and budget management services, and we work hard to consistently maximize your return on ad spend.
With many years of experience under our belts with all different industries and business sizes, we aren’t afraid of working with large budgets or hundreds of franchised business locations. We use modern, best-practice paid search strategies to ensure you make the most of the money you spend. Contact us to experience the power of franchise PPC marketing for your business.