Case study
Franchise Google Ads case study: calls and orders up 5x at the weakest locations
A 40-location pizza franchise gave us its ten lowest-performing stores. With tracking and rebuilt Google Ads, one store went from 21 calls and online orders a month to 107, and another from 38 to 90, on the same budget.
A U.S. pizza franchise with 40 locations had Google Ads accounts with no conversion tracking, run by an agency that reported clicks as sales. The franchise handed ARC its ten weakest stores. We added GA4 and call tracking to every location, rebuilt each store’s campaigns around phone orders, and removed searches meant for other pizza chains. Within three months, cost per call or online order fell from $36.47 to $7.13 at one store and from $20.23 to $8.65 at another, with spend flat at about $770 a month per store.
- Client: Pizza delivery franchise, 40 U.S. locations, including stores in Madera and Redding, California
- Scope: The ten lowest-performing locations, one Google Ads account each
- Channel: Google Ads search
- What counted as a conversion: Phone calls over 30 seconds (from ads or the website) and online orders
- Period: September to November 2022
- Result: Location B: 21 to 107 conversions a month. Location A: 38 to 90. Spend unchanged
The situation
The franchise knew something was wrong with how its ad accounts were run. We audited a couple of them for free and found no tracking at all: the previous agency had told the owners that clicks meant sales. The franchise took our audit back to that agency, nothing improved, and they gave ARC their ten lowest-performing stores to turn around.
What we changed
Tracking first
- Set up a GA4 property for each location, so online-order revenue was visible store by store
- Added call tracking, including custom code on location websites that weren’t built to take tracking scripts
- Counted a conversion only for a completed call over 30 seconds or an online order
Campaigns built around the phone
- Talking to location owners, we learned that phone orders brought in more revenue than online orders, so calls became the main goal
- Built new search campaigns for every location
- Removed searches for competing pizza chains, so the calls we paid for were meant for this franchise
- Optimized each store individually every week rather than setting and forgetting the account
The results
There was no earlier data to compare against, because nothing had been tracked. September is the first month of the new campaigns, including the days they were being set up.
| Month (2022) | Location A conversions | A cost per conversion | Location B conversions | B cost per conversion |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September (launch month) | 38 | $20.23 | 21 | $36.47 |
| October | 68 | $11.32 | 81 | $9.40 |
| November | 90 | $8.65 | 107 | $7.13 |
At Location A, calls rose from 26 to 44 in the first two months and online orders by 116%. Of those 44 calls, 23 came straight from the ads, 12 were dialed from the website, and 9 were taps on the website’s phone number. At Location B, calls went from 18 in the first month to 54 in the second, and online orders from Google Ads rose more than sixteenfold.
What this means for franchises and multi-location brands
- Clicks are not sales. If an agency can’t show calls and orders per location, nobody knows which stores the ads are helping.
- Ask the location owners where the money comes from. Here it was the phone, which changed what every campaign was built to do.
- Keep competitors’ searches out. For a food brand, a call meant for another chain is wasted spend that looks like a result.
- Every location needs its own attention. Ten accounts managed at a bulk rate still got individual weekly optimization.
Running ads for several locations?
See how we run Google Ads for franchises and multi-location brands, or book a call and we’ll audit a couple of your locations first, the way we did here.
Performance figures in this case study are reported by ARC Creative Co. from the client’s Google Ads account and reflect a specific engagement. Results vary by market, budget, offer, and sales capacity, and are not a prediction of future performance.