How to Improve Ad Buying Efficiency as a Multi-Location Brand

Reducing CPMs and CPCs, while maintaining, and even improving, performance? Can you have your cake and eat it too? By budgeting digital advertising campaigns on a location-by-location basis, and creating custom audiences for each, you can indeed.

Use these 7 tools to reduce cost and increase efficiency, unlocking more spend into profitable campaigns that boost ROI.

*For more on location-specific digital planning, read our Case for Location Based Marketing Budgets: Why DMA Plans Fall Short (4 minutes).

1. Reduce Demand

Many brands unknowingly are artificially inflating 

1. Location vs. Location Bidding: Two different franchisees who operate in the same area, buying their local advertising independently, can be vying for the same keywords, increasing the cost for both.
2. Brand vs. Local Overlap: A lack of coordination between a brand's systemwide media efforts, and a franchisee's local media strategy, can unintentionally be costing you both.
3. Dead Zones: Market-wide media placement often means serving ads to prospects who lack of proximity to one of your locations. Investing unnecessary $ against keywords at a market level increases the cost of those ads, and the relative per-location cost even greater.

2. Reduce Cost

By reducing demand via the methods above, costs for keywords and ad inventory goes down. And that's not a one-time benefit, those decreases are efficiencies to be leveraged ongoing.

3. Agile Budgets

Reducing costs frees up budget for you to level-up in channels that are performing well, further driving down overall CPM and CPC.

4. Competitive Conquesting

Only conquest competitors that are in your immediate trade areas - exclude their locations in your market that your nearby customers are unlikely to visit. This reduces the Cost Per Acquisition of the customers of your competitors.

5. Increase Relevance

Consumers only give attention to ads when they know your location or service is within convenient reach. Over time they'll subconsciously give more consideration to your message, driving up engagement and conversion, creating further cost efficiency.

6. Benefit from Longtail Keyword Strategies

The tactics above free up budget to invest in specific, less common phrases that prospective visitors are likely to use when closer to the point-of-purchase. There is much less competition and demand for these terms, driving overall cost down further.

7. Leverage AI-Driven Buying Options

AI-driven smart bidding options such as Google’s Smart Bidding strategy allows advertisers to optimize their bids in real-time, focusing on auctions that are more likely to convert and avoiding overbidding on highly competitive keywords.

Ready to see the location based marketing experience on Hyperlocology?