MULTI LOCATION RETAIL · LOCAL DEMAND · 24 MONTHS
Twenty locations.
495 actions a month.
A construction materials franchise running twenty branches on $554 a month in total media. I have held the account for two years. The brief has never been to grow the budget. It has been to make a budget that small produce something a branch manager can actually see walk through the door.
Why this one matters
In two years the ads have produced no form fills at all. The form is not broken. It fires, it records, it matches when somebody completes it. Nobody arriving from ads ever does.
Judged the way an e-commerce account gets judged, this one produces nothing and should be switched off. Judged by what a person actually does when they need building materials near them, it produced 188 contact requests and 307 direction lookups last month, on about $554 in total media. A little over a dollar per action.
Local intent does not behave like purchase intent. Measure it the same way and you will switch off something that works.
What I did
Two years of unglamorous work. Budget reallocated between branches every month, because the location that converts in March is not the one that converts in August. Headlines and descriptions rewritten each time Google's automated review misread the category. Call assets built per branch, graphics rotated as they fatigued.
Over fifteen months clicks went from 3,382 to 15,349 a month while spend doubled. Cost per click fell 56%, from just over eight cents to three and a half.
The part most case studies leave out
April was the worst month of the two years. Clicks fell from 19,795 to 3,960 and cost per click went up fivefold. The account had been caught in an automated policy review, and getting it out took appeals that ran for months rather than days.
Contacts since have not been a clean line either: 224 in May, 108 in June, 160 in July, 188 in August. June is the bottom of that recovery, not a trend. I am showing all four because showing only August would suggest a curve that is not there.
If this sounds like your account
You run several locations on a budget that would not cover one campaign in a national account, and your reports show conversions that look nothing like sales. Nobody trusts the numbers, so the temptation is to switch the whole thing off.
The question is not whether the budget is too small. It is whether you are counting the thing your customer actually does.
Figures are platform reported and cover June 2025 through August 2026. The account bills in Mexican pesos and is shown here converted at a fixed 18 to 1 for readability, so dollar figures move with that rate. The engagement has run two years and is ongoing. Client name withheld. Reporting available on request, write to carlos@anverse.media.