Google treats every one of your branches as a single advertiser. One of your ads appears in a given ad location, and Local Services shows only your highest ranking profile where two locations overlap. Adding locations multiplies what you spend, not what you are shown for, so the work is deciding which location wins which market and arranging the accounts so it can.
As Featured In · Our Research Cited By
This is the fact that changes multi-location maths, and it is published in Google's own policies rather than inferred from a case study. You are one advertiser. Extra locations, extra campaigns and extra accounts do not buy extra slots on the same search.
"Trying to show more than one ad for your business, app, or site in a single ad location" is listed as a prohibited practice, alongside the requirement that "each website or app that you promote should offer distinct value to users."
Google Ads policy, Abusing the ad network: unfair advantage, read 17 September 2026"If your business has multiple locations that serve the same geographic area, Local Services will show only the highest ranking ad in response to a user's query."
Local Services Help, About ad rankings, read 17 September 2026So the question is never how to get all your locations in front of one searcher. It is which location should win that searcher, what it is worth to that location, and how much of the map each branch is allowed to claim. Everything below follows from that.
Structure decides who pays, who owns the data and how well the bidding learns. It does not decide how many of your ads show, because that is already settled. We run all of these and will say which fits your ownership model rather than defaulting to whichever is easiest to bill.
Every location gets its own campaign, its own geo targeting and its own budget inside a single account. Conversion history stays in one place, which matters because bidding learns from volume, and a new location inherits a working account instead of starting cold. The trade-off is that corporate holds the account, so a franchisee who leaves takes nothing with them.
Each franchisee owns and funds their account, and a manager account gives the group and the agency access. Billing, ownership and exit are clean. The cost is that every account learns on its own data, so small locations bid with thin signal, and the group has to keep the accounts from targeting the same postcodes.
Brand terms run centrally where they are cheapest to defend, and non-brand local campaigns sit with each location. This keeps franchisees from bidding against corporate on the brand name, which is the most common way multi-location accounts waste money on clicks they already had.
You cannot use extra accounts to get more than one of your ads into the same ad location. Google lists trying to show more than one ad for your business in a single ad location as a prohibited practice, and says accounts must each be connected to a real business. Structure decides who pays and who owns, not how many slots you get.
"Attempting to use multiple accounts to get around those policies isn't allowed." Google also advises that "if you have multiple advertising accounts, make sure each account is connected to a real business."
Google Ads policy, Abusing the ad network: circumventing systems, read 17 September 2026Most multi-location accounts we audit are paying twice for the same ground. Nobody planned it. It happens quietly, through radius targeting drawn around each branch and a brand campaign nobody owns.
Radius targeting drawn around each branch usually overlaps in the middle, where the population is. Both campaigns enter the same auctions, one of them wins your slot, and the other spends its budget on impressions it was never going to be shown for.
A searcher types your brand name. If three locations all bid on it, you pay a higher price to buy a click you would probably have had for free from the organic result underneath.
Local Services Ads has its own version of this rule, published plainly: where locations serve the same geographic area, only the highest ranking ad is shown. Adding profiles in an overlapping territory does not buy more placements.
Carve the map so each location owns its postcodes, exclude the others, keep brand in one place, and let the strongest profile hold the contested middle. It is not clever, it is just the work, and it is the first thing we check on a multi-location audit.
Multi-location is not one situation. What can be moved, who signs off and who keeps the account differ completely between these, and an agency that runs all three the same way is really only running one of them.
Head office funds everything and wants the cheapest cost per booked job across the group, so money should move freely between markets each month. The risk is treating the branches as one average: the branch with spare capacity and the branch turning work away get the same budget because nobody has split the reporting.
Each franchisee funds their own market and answers for their own numbers, so budget cannot simply be moved from a strong market to a weak one. Corporate sets standards and usually owns the brand terms, while local campaigns belong to the owner paying for them. Most of the friction we see is about who controls the account rather than what the campaigns do.
The dealer is a separate company that sells a shared brand, so ownership sits with the dealer and the manufacturer usually contributes co-op funds against rules about how the brand is shown. The account has to survive an audit of those rules, which means keeping brand and local spend separately reportable from day one.
Every decision above depends on knowing what each site produced. That is a tracking job, and it is the part most groups are missing when they come to us. Four things make the numbers usable.
One number for the brand makes every report useless to the people who run the sites. Each location gets its own tracking number so calls attribute to the branch that earned them, and the branch manager can be shown their own calls rather than a share of a group total.
Clicks and calls are the start. Jobs that were actually booked, with their value, get imported back into the account as offline conversions so bidding learns which searches produce work in that market rather than which produce the cheapest form fill.
The profile is what ties an ad to a real address, and it is what Local Services matches against during screening. Each location needs its own, kept current, with the hours and service area that branch actually covers.
Head office wants the group view. The person running one site wants their own calls, their own cost per booked job and nothing else. Both views come out of the same account, and both get sent, because a report nobody at branch level understands gets ignored and then argued about.
Nothing here is exotic. It is the order that matters, because fixing the overlap before raising budgets is what stops the group paying twice while the rest is built.
We pull the geo targeting of every existing campaign and draw where they collide. On most groups this is the single biggest finding of the audit, and it costs nothing to fix.
Who owns each account, whose card is on it, what happens when an owner leaves. This gets decided before campaigns are built, not after the first invoice.
Each location gets the ground it can actually serve, the others are excluded from it, and the contested middle goes to the site that converts it best.
Brand searches get defended once, centrally, instead of three locations bidding the price up against each other on a click the group had already earned.
Capacity, competitors and cost per booked job all move. Allocation across locations is the recurring work, and it is most of what managing a group actually is.
If Local Services Ads is part of the plan, the screening work scales with the number of sites, not with the brand. This is the item that moves launch dates, and it is worth starting before the campaigns are built.
"If a business is serving in multiple locations, they must provide business and employee level licenses for each location."
Local Services Help, Understand the screening and verification process, read 17 September 2026Insurance requirements depend on the category and the location, so a group operating across state lines can hold different obligations per site. Our multi-location Local Services guide covers the profile mechanics, and the gym page covers how we split budgets between locations once everything is live.
This question decides more than it looks like it does. If corporate holds the ad account, a departing owner loses the conversion history their own money paid for, and the incoming owner inherits it. If the franchisee holds it, the group loses continuity in that market. Neither is wrong, but it has to be decided deliberately and written down before any spend happens.
Our position is the same one every page on this site carries: whoever the account is opened for, owns it. The Google Ads account, every Business Profile, the call tracking numbers, the landing pages and the conversion record stay in that name. If you end the engagement, none of it travels with us, and there is nothing to negotiate on the way out.
Groups that run a co-op fund usually want a third arrangement: corporate pays for brand campaigns from the fund while each location funds its own local campaigns. That works, and it is another reason to settle the account structure before the first campaign is built rather than after the first invoice.
Ask these before handing over anything. The answers separate agencies faster than a deck full of logos.
It is not more visibility. Google shows one of your ads in a given ad location, and using extra accounts to get around that is against its policy. Ask what the second account is actually for.
Money drifts to the cheapest market rather than the one with capacity to fill. The gym work taught us this the hard way across 56+ accounts.
If calls and forms are not attributed per location, nobody can tell which branch the spend earned. One tracking number for the brand makes the report unusable for the people who run the sites.
Ask now, in writing: if a franchisee leaves, what happens to the account, the data and the number? The answer changes what the account is worth to the person paying for it.
When the fee rises with the budget, the incentive points one way. We publish flat per-location pricing and use a percentage only where a single account covers 20 locations.
A page with a store finder is not a local page. The address, the reviews and the phone number that belong to that branch are what convert the click you paid for.
Ad spend is billed by Google straight to you, so you see every dollar of it. Landing pages are included. Month to month, no setup fee.
Same arithmetic we do on the call, using the published rates above. Enter what the group spends on ads in a month.
The per location rates apply at those location counts. Below 10 locations we quote from the published single location rates, and we will tell you on the first call which of these three your group falls into.
No. Google lists "trying to show more than one ad for your business, app, or site in a single ad location" as a prohibited practice under its unfair advantage policy, and separately says that attempting to use multiple accounts to get around its policies is not allowed. Whatever structure you use, one of your ads shows. The question is which location it should be.
Google says it plainly: if your business has multiple locations that serve the same geographic area, Local Services will show only the highest ranking ad in response to a user query. A second profile in an overlapping territory adds screening work, not placements.
It depends on who pays and who owns. One account with a campaign per location keeps conversion history together and is simpler to allocate across, which suits brand-owned branches. One account per location under a manager account keeps billing and ownership with each franchisee, at the cost of thinner data in each account. We run both and will tell you which fits your structure.
Yes. Google states that if a business is serving in multiple locations, it must provide business and employee level licences for each location, and insurance requirements depend on the category and the location. Plan the paperwork before you plan the launch date.
Whoever we open them for, and it is written down before we start. Every account, landing page, call tracking number and conversion record stays in that owner name under our Ownership Guarantee. If you leave, none of it moves with us.
At 10 locations it is $499 per location per month. At 20 accounts it is $350 each per month. If all 20 locations run inside a single account, it is 10% of monthly ad spend instead. A single location uses our published rates: $445 a month for Local Services Ads, $695 for Google Ads, $995 for both.
Both, and they are different engagements. A franchisor wants consistency, brand control and a system each new owner can switch on. A single franchisee wants their own location full and does not care about the national average. We have run both, including 56+ gym accounts across two franchise groups and 250+ contractor accounts across the team career.
No. Google bills your ad spend directly to your card, so you see every dollar of it. Our fee is only management, and landing pages are included at no extra cost.
Same approach, different economics. Each page carries the cost and job value data for that trade.
A brand homepage with a store finder is not a local page. The click was paid for in one market, so it should land on that branch address, that branch phone number and the reviews left by people in that town, not on a list of forty locations to choose from.
Most contractor searches happen on a phone, so the page is built to load fast there. Faster pages convert more of the clicks you have already paid for.
Every call and form is connected to tracking from day one, so you can see which ads and which pages actually produce booked work rather than just traffic.
On-page SEO and local schema markup so the site earns map and organic visibility over time instead of only working while the ads are switched on.
30 minutes, operator to operator. We look at how your locations overlap, where two of them are bidding on the same searches, and what we would change. You decide whether to continue.
Book a Free Audit Call