Local search that finally matched footfall to spend.

Fifteen outlets, one regional performance-marketing budget, and a media plan that split spend evenly across every location because that was the plan the previous agency had set up two years earlier and nobody had revisited since.

The assumption underneath it, that fifteen outlets pull roughly equal footfall, had never actually been checked. It hadn't been true in a while, if it ever was. Three outlets near transit hubs were quietly carrying the chain; several others were burning ad spend into neighbourhoods that had moved on.

Search presence told the same story from a different angle: most outlets had no claimed listing, duplicate listings under old branding, or a listing with the wrong hours, wrong photos, and reviews nobody had replied to in over a year.

We went outlet by outlet. Not a blanket 'local SEO audit' PDF, but fifteen individual listings cleaned up, verified, and given accurate hours, categories, and photography, because a chain-wide fix that ignores outlet-level mess just automates the mess.

Once the listings were honest, the footfall data underneath them was honest too, for the first time. That's what let us reallocate the paid budget: not a guess about which outlets 'felt' busier, but a redistribution toward the locations the search and foot-traffic signal actually supported.

The chain's ops team pushed back once, reasonably: pulling spend from underperforming outlets felt like giving up on them. We reframed it as the opposite: the outlets that were struggling needed a different kind of help than more ad spend into a listing nobody could find.

None of this was clever. It was fifteen small, unglamorous fixes done in the right order, on the assumption that spend should follow where people are actually walking in rather than where a media plan assumed they'd be two years ago.