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Advice on setting up a multi-location PPC campaign?
Posted by on December 18, 2025 at 4:23 pmI am a solo marketing manager with no team and no money to hire an agency or outside help. Since I have an agency background, I'm able to handle a majority of our marketing in-house, but PPC is not my strongest area and I am looking for advice on how best to set our 2026 campaign up.
The agency we previously had but needed to fire set it up for 2025 and that's how I've been running it, but I haven't had time to really dig in and optimize. It did well in terms of clicks, conversions, etc. but I do think there are areas we can improve on. We have 18 locations across two states, when they set up they campaign, they did one budget for all 18 locations and then did 3 ad group categories: branded, service, and competitor.
(In the market, we have fairly large chain competitors that out perform us and have much more budget, but management likes me to keep the competitor keyword group so we can try getting some of those clicks as they can take some of ours by just spending more).
With the current set up, I feel like our locations in the largest city in our service area are taking up most of the budget. For 2026, I'm thinking about increasing the budget and then dividing it up into regions so some of the cities outside our larger service area get some allocation.
As for the ad groups, I'm trying to decide if I want to continue with the branded, competitor, and service groups like we did this year. Or if it's better to give each specific office their own ad group and then combine the keywords from the old ad groups into the location one since the ad copy is the same.
Can anyone give any advice on how you like to set up campaigns for multi-location businesses? Overall, I think the keywords and ad groups this year were solid for giving us leads, but I want to make sure for 2026 the budget is more evenly allocated across all 18 and am not sure of the best way to do it.
Appreciate your help in advance!
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1 Reply
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Breaking up into regions, or even segmenting top locations into their own campaigns is a solid start. You may even find you don’t need to spend as much on your top locations and can allocate extra budgets to under performers.
Make sure you segment out brand terms into their own separate campaign(s). You want to treat your service and competitor keywords as your net new prospecting campaigns and branded as your returning customers essentially.
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