Three Shops, One Advertising Decision
Each branch pays its own portals, and head office adds the invoices up. That is not one decision made three times — it is three decisions nobody made, and the total hides which of them was right.
Three branches. Each has its own listings, its own renewal dates, and its own manager who signed something at some point.
⚠️ At head office these arrive as one line: advertising. The total is known to the penny and tells you nothing, because it is the sum of three separate situations that were never compared to each other.
What the total hides
⭕ The same portal is almost never worth the same to two branches. One sits in a district where that portal is how people search. One sits where it is not. The price is identical; the return is not remotely.
⚠️ Add them together and the good one subsidises the bad one forever, because nothing in the combined figure can tell them apart. The branch quietly wasting money looks exactly like the branch quietly making it.
The three questions the total cannot answer
Which branch is paying for clients it would have had anyway
A busy branch in a well-known location gets walk-ins. ⛔ Some share of what its listing "delivers" would have arrived regardless, and that share is highest exactly where the branch is strongest.
⭕ This is the most common overspend in multi-site operations, and it survives because the branch's numbers look good — they are just good for a different reason than the invoice implies.
Which branch is under-spending
⚠️ The mirror image, and it gets noticed far less. A branch clearing its ceiling several times over is a branch that should be spending more, and nobody proposes that, because advertising spend is a thing that gets defended rather than argued for.
Whether the renewal dates are working against you
Three branches, three renewal cycles, three separate conversations with the same sales team. ⛔ You are negotiating three times from the weakest position each time, when the same spend across one date would be a different conversation.
What to work out per branch, not per company
⭕ The ceiling: the most a channel can be worth to that branch. What a client bills on average there, how many times they return there, and what that branch pays that channel. Three short calculations, one per site.
⇒ The arithmetic is on a page — free, no sign-up, and it asks nothing about you: the ad-budget ceiling calculator.
⚠️ Run it three times and you will usually find the branches disagree sharply — which is the finding. The total was never one number; it was three, and averaging them destroyed the only information that could have changed anything.
Why this does not need new systems
⛔ You are not building reporting. You need three figures per branch, and every one of them exists already: average bill, return rate, monthly cost.
⚠️ The obstacle is that they live in three places and nobody has permission to see all three at once. That is an arrangement question, not a data question, and it is usually settled in one conversation.
⭕ What you get is one sentence per branch: this channel clears its ceiling, or it does not. Three sentences replace a total that could never be argued with because it could never be broken apart.
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