ARC Solution
Paid media for franchises, without locations bidding against each other.
ARC runs paid media for franchise and multi-location businesses, where the real problem is not the ads — it is the seam between what head office controls and what the location needs.
The problem
Centralise it and local dies. Decentralise it and you bid against yourself.
Run everything from head office and you get generic campaigns, a website that cannot tell one market from another, and location listings nobody has touched since they were created. Push it all to the locations and the brand fragments into forty versions of itself — each buying the same keyword against the other, each inflating your own costs.
The tension is structural, not a failure of effort. Head office needs consistency and comparability. The location needs relevance to a market head office has never visited. Both are right.
Underneath sits an unglamorous data problem: location information, hours, categories and reviews drifting quietly out of date across dozens of profiles. Not strategic work — just what decides whether any of the strategic work is visible.
Our approach
What we do for a multi-location brand
Decide the brand/location split deliberately
What is standardised, what is local, who owns each. Ambiguity here produces fragmentation and irrelevance simultaneously.
Stop locations competing for the same keywords
Geographic structure and shared negatives. A common, expensive and entirely preventable problem.
Allocate budget on opportunity, not evenly
Markets differ in competition, maturity and headroom. Equal budgets guarantee overspend in some and underinvestment in others.
Report at both altitudes
Leadership needs portfolio performance; a location manager needs their own numbers. One report serving both usually serves neither.
The proof
We have done this, and documented it.
Read the situation, the strategy, the work completed, and the result — including the screenshots behind the numbers.
Common questions
Questions we are asked in this market
Should locations run their own ads?
Rarely without coordination — that is exactly how locations end up bidding against each other. Local input with central control is usually the workable middle.
How do you stop cannibalisation?
Geographic campaign structure and shared negative lists, enforced centrally. It is preventable and most brands only discover it after paying for it.
Do we need a page per location?
For every location that genuinely serves customers and can carry distinct, useful content. A thin duplicate page with the town name swapped is worse than none.
Can you work alongside our franchisees' own agencies?
Yes, and often that is the reality. Someone still has to hold the whole picture, which is usually the actual gap.
Let’s determine whether this is the right growth lever.
Tell us what the business is trying to achieve, what is currently limiting progress, and what has already been attempted.