Growing a Franchise
As the customer journey becomes harder to track, franchise brands need to look beyond clicks and impressions to understand which marketing investments are actually creating demand.
Franchise brands have access to more marketing data than ever, but determining which numbers matter has become increasingly complicated. Consumers can encounter a brand through search, social media, streaming video, outdoor advertising, community events and other channels before they ever contact a business.
At the same time, AI-powered search and large language models (LLMs) are changing how consumers research products and services. Those changes are making familiar measurements such as website traffic and return on ad spend (ROAS) less useful when viewed on their own.
Laura Vodvarka, chief marketing officer at HorsePower Brands, said franchise brands need to focus on the metrics that show whether marketing is producing real business opportunities.
“The most important metrics today are lead quality, lead volume and appointment generation,” Vodvarka said. “While many industries, including home services, are experiencing declines in website traffic as consumers increasingly use AI tools and large language models for research, that does not necessarily translate into fewer opportunities.”
Here is what franchise brands should consider as they move beyond traditional marketing metrics and toward a more complete understanding of performance.
Website traffic and impressions can still provide useful information, but neither necessarily tells a franchise brand whether its marketing is producing customers. That distinction is becoming more important as the way consumers research businesses changes. Someone may gather much of the information needed to make a decision before ever reaching a brand's website.
“In many cases, we're seeing lead volume remain steady while lead quality improves,” she said. “Consumers are often spending more time researching before they ever reach out to a business. As a result, the leads that do convert tend to be better informed and further along in the buying journey.”
Rather than treating traffic or impressions as the primary measures of success, brands can follow what happens further down the funnel. Qualified leads, appointment rates, close rates and customer acquisition provide a clearer connection between marketing activity and revenue.
AI is also creating a new area for brands to monitor. Vodvarka recommends regularly testing how a brand appears across multiple LLMs as consumers increasingly use those platforms for research.
ROAS remains one of the most familiar ways to evaluate advertising. The limitation comes when brands use it to judge individual channels without considering the rest of the customer journey.
A customer who ultimately converts through a search ad may have encountered the business many times before making that search. The final click is easy to measure. The influence of everything that happened before it is much harder to quantify.
“Today's consumers could have 20 to 30 moments of brand awareness across multiple channels before making a purchase decision — seeing a billboard, a display ad, a yard sign, CTV ads, posts or ads on social media, etc.,” Vodvarka said. “Traditional ROAS models, particularly those based on last-click attribution, often give an incomplete picture of what's actually driving results.”
That creates a particular challenge for upper-funnel marketing. Video advertising, sponsorships, community involvement and brand awareness campaigns may contribute to a customer's eventual decision even when those activities receive no direct credit for the conversion.
Incrementality provides another way to evaluate marketing effectiveness. Instead of focusing only on which channel received credit for a conversion, it looks at whether an investment generated business that otherwise would not have occurred.
“By measuring lift rather than simply attribution, brands can better understand which channels are truly creating new demand versus simply capturing demand that already existed,” Vodvarka said. “That said, most franchise teams can't do this on their own and leverage marketing analyst companies or software for help.”
That can help brands separate marketing that creates new demand from marketing that primarily captures demand already in the market.
Franchise brands have the advantage of having multiple locations which allows them to see data across different markets. When locations use common marketing platforms and measurement standards, the franchisor can look for trends.
“When franchisees have high adoption with preferred marketing partners and common measurement frameworks, the brand can aggregate data across many markets to identify patterns that would be difficult for any individual location to uncover on its own,” Vodvarka said.
A larger dataset can help a franchise system establish benchmarks for lead generation, acquisition costs and other performance measures. Franchisees can then compare their local results against broader system performance rather than evaluating numbers without context. Those insights can also inform decisions about marketing mix, channel strategy and budget allocation across the system.
Better measurement does not necessarily mean finding one advertising channel and directing more money toward it. Different marketing activities can contribute at different stages of the customer journey.
“Successful growth typically comes from an integrated approach that combines digital advertising, local marketing, brand-building efforts and self-generated lead activities,” Vodvarka said.
That makes consistency an important part of the analysis. If franchisees frequently start and stop campaigns or use only portions of the recommended strategy, it becomes more difficult to determine how the complete marketing program performs.
The same principle applies when evaluating individual channels. Search may capture existing demand, while brand advertising or community marketing helps create awareness that eventually produces that search. Measuring only the final interaction can lead brands to undervalue the activities that contributed earlier.
The shift from ROAS toward incrementality reflects a broader change in how franchise brands need to think about marketing analytics. Individual metrics remain useful, but they rarely tell the entire story on their own.
Brands can start by identifying the business outcomes that matter most, creating consistent measurement standards across locations and using systemwide data to establish meaningful benchmarks. They can then evaluate individual channels in the context of the broader customer journey.
“Ultimately, the future of franchise marketing is not about finding a single channel that wins,” Vodvarka said. “It is about understanding how all marketing efforts work together to create demand, build trust and generate qualified opportunities.”
As consumer behavior and AI-driven research continue to change the path to purchase, franchise brands will need to keep adapting how they measure performance. The objective remains the same: understand which investments are contributing to customer acquisition and use that information to make better decisions about where the next marketing dollar should go.
Growing and selling franchises is difficult. Want to learn more about how 1851 helps franchisors grow their franchises with confidence? Visit www.1851growthclub.com and see what we can do for you.
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