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Modernizing PPC For Franchises: Best Practices In 2020 And Beyond

As one of the top promotional tools for big businesses, PPC for franchises is becoming an increasingly competitive arena. Today’s post shares 4 best practices to help franchisors stay ahead of the curve in 2020 and beyond.

Review Collective Campaign Performance Every Quarter To Optimize PPC For Franchises

At ClickTecs, we’re committed to continuous improvement, which means we live our lives by recurring cycles of measurement, evaluation, and adjustment. This attitude underpins everything we do, but it’s especially important for optimizing PPC for franchises.

A dedicated campaign manager should be monitoring local franchise owners’ PPC performance every day, but even that’s no excuse for the big wigs to completely check-out. In addition to your local teams’ daily campaign monitoring, we recommend calling your franchise family together at least once per quarter to review goals, budget, and PPC performance. This will allow you to get a big-picture look at the state of affairs and spot any differences between regional, national, and international campaign performance.

When conducting this campaign review, you will want to consider:

• Have I used the entire planned budget for each campaign? If there’s money left over at the end of the “campaign season,” you may want to expand your bidding parameters. On the other hand, if you’re burning through the budget early, you might need to rein in your spending parameters or reevaluate your goals.
• Are the “poor-performance” campaigns that have been optimized showing any signs of improvement? It might be time to eliminate the underperformers and redirect that money into other campaigns. Alternatively, you might choose to invest more in keyword research and campaign content. But either way, those “poor-performance” campaigns need some attention.
• Are there noticeable differences between franchises using the same keywords and campaign parameters? This could reveal some important differences between regional audiences and demographics. Identifying these differences and making the right adjustments could make your campaigns more efficient by an order of magnitude!

Leverage New Google Ads Features To Optimize PPC

Like us, Google’s all about continuous improvement, which is why they’re constantly rolling out new features. If you want to stay ahead of the competition, you’ll need to know how to use these new Google Ad developments (some of which are still in beta, but soon to come!):

• Promotion extensions—Promotion extensions add more value to your franchise’s Search Network text ads by foregrounding sales and promotions around holidays or special events, like Black Friday, Boxing Day, and Back-to-school sales. They’re easy to update; they can be edited without losing data or performance stats; they work brilliantly on mobile devices; and the scheduling possibilities are highly flexible.Here’s an example of a promotion extension used for a Labor Day/end of summer sale:
  
  Advertisers have the option of selecting one of the following 12 occasions:
  
  The selected occasion appears in bold with an eye-catching label, above up to two lines of promotional text. Alternatively, you can leave the “Occasion” field blank and run anytime promotions.

  If you want help setting up promotion extensions for your next franchise PPC campaign, give us a call!

• Gallery ads. According to Google researchers, up to 75% of today’s “impatient” smartphone users expect to get immediate information when searching for franchise products or services, and Google’s new gallery ad feature helps franchisors deliver! Gallery ads use a swipeable, image-based ad format that places your franchise offerings at the top of the search results page.Not only do Gallery Ads improve PPC for franchises by making products and services highly visible, but the rich imagery also communicates brand values, image, and offerings to users even before they visit your website or landing page! Here’s an example of a gallery ad we dug up using a few random Google queries:
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• Lead form extensions. With Google’s new lead form extensions, you can collect leads directly from your PPC ads. Anybody interested in your business offering (or franchise opportunity) can engage you directly by filling out the form, which can be added to both “Search” and “Video” campaigns. With video campaign lead forms, you can also choose the type of leads you want to gather by selecting between “Higher intent” (quality over quantity) and “More volume.”

How To Test New Paid Platforms To Optimize PPC For Franchises In 2021?

Though Google Ads still reigns supreme, alternate paid platforms appreciate in value every single year. Facebook Ads are now recognized as a close second, and there’s plenty of up-and-comers worth investigating, including:

• LinkedIn ads—ideal for franchise development, B2B sales, and even PPC recruiting!
• Pinterest ads—ideal for targeting female-focused demographics to sell products, services, and consumers goods
• Snapchat ads—ideal for targeting younger demographics (e.g. 13 to 35)

These three new paid platforms make for a good start, but we’ve hardly scratched the surface. Get in touch with a ClickTecs representative to learn more about alternative paid platforms you can use to optimize your PPC for franchises.

Embrace Mobilize Customization

At ClickTecs, we like to say that the world is mobile—this is borne out by the fact that 30-50% of all web traffic now comes from mobile users.

Indeed, in most cases, mobile ad traffic has surpassed desktop. Franchisors who don’t optimize for mobile miss out on huge opportunities and forfeit thousands of campaign impressions.

Google’s PPC team recommends the following optimizations at bare minimum:

• Upgrade to expanded text ads
• Use the right ad extensions for mobile devices
• Follow best practices for mobile content writing (e.g. use compelling headlines and strong calls-to-action, and make the most of description text)
• Make sure your mobile landing page matches your ad

If you want to do more than the bare minimum, get in touch! Our team specializes in mobile PPC for franchises.

Learn More About PPC For Franchises — Free Clicktecs Consultation

You can brush up on PPC for franchises on our website, watch some informative videos on our YouTube channel, or call 866-311-7189 to speak directly with a ClickTecs representative. All consultations are 100% free, and there’s never any pressure to buy—we just love talking shop, and we’re eager to help!

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