Paid search across a franchise network is mostly a governance question. The franchisor wants brand consistency, national efficiency and no franchisee bidding against another. The franchisee wants their own territory covered and control over their own money. Advertising funds, local co-op contributions and individual budgets all pay into the same auction. Deciding the structure before the campaigns is what stops a network from competing with itself.
Stop locations bidding against each other
Two franchisees targeting overlapping areas on the same terms raise each other's costs and hand the difference to the platform. The fix is clean geographic separation, a single account structure or a shared negative and territory framework, and a rule for the boundaries. Whoever administers it needs the authority to enforce it, which is the part that is really being decided.
Decide who owns the accounts and the data
Centralised accounts give consistency, comparable reporting and continuity when a franchisee leaves; franchisee-owned accounts give local control and fragment the learning. Most networks that work run a central structure with local visibility and locally funded budgets. Whatever you choose, write down what happens to the account and its history when a location changes hands.
Brand terms are a network-level decision
Bidding on the brand is cheap and defensive, and if every location does it independently the network pays several times to defend one name. Run brand campaigns centrally, route the click to the right location by geography, and exclude brand from franchisee performance reporting so nobody's numbers are flattered by traffic the brand earned.
Report per location against a common definition
A franchisee needs to see their own spend, leads and cost per lead, and the franchisor needs to compare locations fairly. That requires one conversion definition across the network and consistent tracking. Without it, every underperforming location has a measurement explanation and nobody can tell which ones are real.
Questions people ask about franchise ppc services
Should advertising funds pay for local search?
That depends on your franchise agreement and what the fund may lawfully be spent on, which is a legal question before it is a marketing one. Get the position in writing, since fund usage disputes are among the more common sources of franchise friction.
Can franchisees run their own campaigns?
Many networks permit it within rules: approved landing pages, brand-compliant creative, defined geography and no bidding on the brand or on other locations' territories. Enforcement requires visibility, so permission should come with a requirement to grant account access centrally.
How should budgets be set across locations?
By local demand and capacity rather than evenly. Some territories are cheaper and busier than others, and a flat allocation systematically overspends in easy markets and starves the ones that need investment.
What happens when a location is sold?
Agree in advance that the account, its history and the tracking transfer with the location, and that the outgoing franchisee cannot take or delete them. This is easy to write into the network's standards and very difficult to resolve after a contentious exit.