Webinar Recap: Essential Strategies for Accelerating Franchise Marketing ROI

As an SEO marketer, you know the true value of good data. Good data can increase our marketing ROI tenfold, but we need to understand how to home in good data, and tell it apart from bad, to increase revenue. This is especially true for multi-unit organizations, which need to understand how to build revenue from their marketing efforts quickly and direct those efforts toward multiple locations simultaneously.

During the “TruPresence Talks” webinar, Nils De Moor and Jeremy LaDuque connect and discuss how multi-unit organizations can achieve a faster return on their marketing investments with the help of business intelligence tools and unique data analytics. Additionally, they cover how the new franchise-specific SEO tool by the makers of WooRank, known as TruPresence, can accommodate the data reporting needs of a multi-unit organization and provide the location analytics to succeed.

Keeping Up with Google

It’s safe to assume that there is always something going on with Google. As Nils said in the webinar, “if there wasn’t something always going on with Google, I wouldn’t have been doing this for twelve years.” Nils and Jeremy discuss the following Google topics:

Core Web Vitals  

The first way to keep up with Google is to remember your Core Web Vitals (CWVs). CWVs measure three metrics, Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), and finally, First Input Delay (FID) to determine how positive a user’s experience is on your site.

• LCP: measures how long your site’s largest piece of content takes to load.
• CLS: observes how the content moves dynamically on a webpage.
• FID: how long it takes for a browser to load a page up to a point where a user can start interacting with a page.

For multi-unit organizations, that may have a corporate and local level structure, there needs to be open communication and outlined responsibility between the corporate web developers and local managers so they can draft relevant, optimized content without negatively impacting the CWVs of the overall site.

Establishing Authority

Next, it’s always important to establish authority in your content. Content is always king, but more specifically, relevant content is king. You can improve your credibility over a topic by updating content, removing outdated content, and publishing new content that is relevant to trending topics.

For multi-unit organizations, those operating at the local level can draft expert local content. Local content experts need to be sure that if they can update their location webpage, they are not hurting the overall site at the same time. That’s where being knowledgeable of CWVs can come in handy.

Google Analytics 4

The biggest news in Google’s world is the transition from Universal Analytics to the new Google Analytics 4. This is important for everyone’s website, regardless of whether you’re a single entity or a multi-unit organization. Google Analytics prioritizes the user’s journey and seeks to understand how a user discovers a site, interacts with it, and how that interaction ends. The best piece of advice Nils and Jeremy can offer is to incorporate Google Analytics 4 sooner rather than later, so when Google fully transitions, you will have maintained your data reporting instead of starting from scratch.

Multi-unit organizations that have their individual locations operate under a subdomain of a primary URL:

• Mikesfamousdoughnuts.com
• Mikesfamousdoughnuts.com/store/0002/manhattan-ny

There is no automatic migration path to Google Analytics 4, so multi-unit organizations with hundreds of stores using subdomains need to prioritize restructuring their analytics as soon as possible.

Actionable Reporting

Business Intelligence (BI) tools are essential to driving revenue with the help of data. The data we receive from Google Analytics is artifact data, meaning it describes what’s happened. However, it might not explain why something’s happened. Utilizing a separate BI tool lets us build our own reports, filter our data, and prioritize the issues unique to our business. The ability to filter analytic data is mission-critical to any multi-unit organization, as it pinpoints and measures the performance of an individual location against other locations.

BI tools like Tableau, Google Data Studio, and now TruPresence can be used to aggregate your data. Using these tools simultaneously with Google Analytics will give you insights into not only your performance level, but why you’re performing the way that you are.

Location Analytics

The true value of TruPresence is its unique ability to provide analytics for multi-unit organizations for each individual location. Nils and Jeremy call this location analytics, where a multi-unit organization or franchise can collect, process, and aggregate the data for an individual location and score its performance.

Before, an SEO audit wouldn’t be able to tell the difference between the main URL and a subdomain, seeing these as the same site. Franchisors understand that a subdomain, a version of the main URL with a forward slash and a specific location added in, acts as a separate website for that individual location. As a result, there was a need for an SEO tool that understood these URL naming conventions and could thoroughly audit hundreds of location webpages at scale.

Franchises and multi-unit organizations can significantly benefit from location analytics, now having the tools at hand to understand and improve each location’s performance, set standard practices, and accelerate marketing ROI by directing it toward the right locations.