Businesses with dozens or even thousands of locations have a unique paid search (PPC) challenge; how to efficiently execute a localized strategy. I’ve worked on many multi location PPC accounts that approached the issue of multiple locations in different ways, and while there are pros and cons to all account structure strategies, below are the main considerations that we, at Flint Analytics, take in to account when determining the best solution for each of our clients.

Billing

Adwords offers a few choices when it comes to billing: automatic payments, manual payments and invoicing. Depending on how many locations you intend to advertise for and how you intend to pay for each location’s spend will determine which option will fit your needs best.

I’ve worked on ppc accounts for huge, Fortune 500 companies that had little concern for individual store KPIs and instead were focused on regional and national performance as well as performance by service category (campaign group level). In this type of model, it was best to use one PPC account that rolls their media dollar spend up to one invoice at the corporate level where the marketing department received a monthly invoice for all locations.

Alternatively, I’ve also experienced companies that have individualized needs for each of their locations. For example, perhaps you have 100 franchise locations that all pay in to the same marketing pot and you need to be able to easily access individual store invoices. In this scenario, it may make more sense set up separate accounts for each store or region of shared stores that share an invoice. Each account can pay with a credit card as an automatic payment or set up monthly invoicing (if they meet Google’s invoicing requirements and pass the credit check).

The company’s need to keep track of their media spend will determine how you want to set up their Adwords account(s). This is something we hammer out with clients early on in the process so you set up everything correctly the first time.

Budget

Adwords made things easier for us when they rolled out the capability to share daily media budget across multiple campaigns. You can even set many separate daily budgets and share them across different campaigns. For instance, say you have 10 locations in a Midwest region that all share the same media budget. You could make a “Midwest Budget” and share it with only the Midwest stores’ campaigns. Then, say you have 20 stores in the Southern region. The same concept would apply; create a “Southern Budget” and apply it to only the campaigns that are targeted to your Southern region.

This technique makes it easier to provide many store campaigns with a chunk of daily budget and allows the AdWords system to allocate those dollars where they’re needed throughout the day. The major pro to this system is avoiding the task of manually allocating dollars across campaigns. That being said, there are also some cons to this setup. For one, if your daily budget is limited because you only have say $5,000 to spend per day but your keywords and geographies can spend $20,000 per day, AdWords won’t necessarily send the dollars to the top performing campaigns, but rather, to where those dollars can be spent.

Day-to-Day Management

Granular ad groups with relevant ad copy and corresponding landing pages are the backbone of PPC. When planning your account structure, it’s a good idea to think through how many ad groups, keywords and pieces of copy you’ll end up with and if you’ll be able to effectively manage the workload. If you’re managing 20 accounts under the same company, can you efficiently keep tabs on their performance and make bulk changes quickly if they’re all in separate accounts? Alternatively, if you don’t make your campaigns and ad groups granular enough, can you reap all the benefits of a localized structure or will you run the risk of appearing too general/national to capture a local audience?

Landing Pages

Businesses with multiple locations may struggle with PPC performance when they send all of their visitors to the same landing page or to a small batch of landing pages that aren’t localized. Users are more likely to convert when the landing page matches their search query and provides them with the content they’re looking for without having to dig in to your site to find it. We can take this concept one step further by providing a localized landing page that matches the user’s intended location or physical location.

As an example, let’s look at an appliance and electronics store that operates hundreds of locations across the United States. Let’s assume this location has three stores in the Indianapolis metro area. If you’re running a refrigerator sale at all nationwide locations, and someone in the Indy market searches for “GE profile refrigerators Indianapolis”, you’ll be able to appeal to that potential searcher by sending them not only to a GE refrigerator product page, but can take them one step further by showing them products available in their service area. On the landing page, that searcher is more likely to explore your offerings if they can see that there is an appliance store within a few miles of their home where they can go see the appliance in person after browsing on your site.

In addition, think of the other calls to action you can add to your landing pages to help improve the localized experience: discount coupons for their store, a trackable phone number if they want to call directly, your local address and store hours, relevant offers that may sweeten the deal (like free shipping and installation), an efficient e-commerce system if they’re ready to buy, etc.

Your multi location PPC strategy is made up of many components and PPC work is never really finished, but the key items highlighted above should help you get off on the right foot. Do you have any questions about how to improve your multi location PPC? Contact us here.