Facebook ads for franchises:
local, without the overlap.

Facebook and Instagram do two different jobs for a franchise network. Brand ads keep the name familiar to people who aren't looking yet, so it's the one they think of when the need turns up. Local ads give someone near one store a reason to come in this month: a new service, an offer this store runs, a face they recognise.

Judge them differently. Brand ads are about reach and how often the same people see them. Local ads are about calls, bookings and enquiries per store. Put both in one campaign and you can't judge either, and the franchisee in Tuggerah can't tell what their share of the fund bought.

Meta's set-up for chains is a main Page with location Pages under it. Its developer docs describe this as different page locations of a parent business Page, with the example of a restaurant chain. Each location Page links to the parent, and can carry a store number that matches your own list of locations.

Meta's rules for tools that create these Pages are telling. Only create Pages for a real physical address, and give people a way to claim an existing place first, to prevent duplicates. Duplicates are the usual mess in a network: a Page a franchisee set up years ago with the brand name and a suburb, a check-in place customers made, and the official location Page, all splitting the followers, reviews and messages.

Find them before you spend. Search the brand name on Facebook, list every Page and place, and work out which ones to claim, merge or close. Then give each store's team access to its own location Page only.

Meta lets you target a radius around an address or a dropped pin of 1 to 80 kilometres. Targeting a city works differently: the radius around a city runs from 17 to 80 kilometres, which is far too wide for two stores in the same city. For a network, address or pin targeting per store is the one to use.

Overlapping circles are where franchise social spend leaks. If the Erina and Gosford stores each target 10 km, a lot of people sit inside both circles. They see both stores' ads, both stores pay to reach them, and the stores bid against each other for the same people's attention. Worse, if territories are exclusive, one franchisee is paying to advertise into the other's patch.

Meta also lets you choose between people who live in an area and people who were recently there, based on their device. The recent option can't be used to exclude locations, so if you're carving out a neighbour's territory, the exclusion only works on where people live.

Enter the distance between two stores and each one's radius. The calculator works out how much of each circle sits inside the other, and the largest radius that keeps them apart. The starting numbers are made up.

Meta's delivery system learns who to show ads to from results. Its guidance is that an ad set usually needs about 50 optimisation events in a week to finish learning. A regional store with a small local budget may never get there if it optimises for bookings, so its ads stay in learning and delivery is less steady.

There are two fixes. Group nearby stores into one regional ad set, say the Central Coast stores together, with each store named in the ad. Or optimise for an event that happens more often, like a click to call or a visit to the store page, then check bookings by hand. Both beat twenty tiny ad sets that never settle.

The national creative should come with gaps for the store to fill: the store's name and suburb, a real photo of the team, a local landmark, and whether the current offer runs there. A brand ad with a Newcastle team photo does more in Charlestown than the same ad with a stock photo, because it answers 'is this the one near me?' before anyone asks.

Keep national offers honest at store level. If an offer only runs at some stores, the local ad for a store that doesn't run it shouldn't carry it. The franchise marketing rules page covers 'participating stores' and fine print.

Head office can check what every store is running without logging in anywhere. The Meta Ad Library lists active ads by Page, which makes a monthly check of rogue offers and old logos a ten-minute job. The guide to the Meta Ad Library shows how.

Name every ad set by store or region, so reports read 'Erina' and 'Tuggerah', not 'Ad set 14'. Report each store's reach, clicks to call, enquiries and cost every month. If you use Meta's instant forms, connect them so each lead goes to the right store straight away, not into a spreadsheet someone downloads on Fridays. The lead generation page covers routing.

Then compare stores against themselves over time, not against each other. A store in a growing suburb and a store in a settled one will never have the same cost per enquiry, and that's not the franchisee's fault.