Melbourne is flat, gridded and enormous, with a bay that eats half of any circle drawn near it and growth corridors that add new suburbs faster than any media plan updates. This page covers what a franchise marketing platform does for a Melbourne network, with measured numbers from Victorian zones.
Amplaro is a digital franchise marketing platform: head office builds local campaigns once, and every Melbourne franchise partner activates them for their own store, targeted to that store's real trade area rather than a circle on a map. The partner picks a campaign, a budget and a date. The brand, the artwork and the spend limits are already locked by head office.
The general version of this page is what a franchise marketing platform is. This one is about what changes when the network is in Melbourne: the bay, the sprawl, and a retail culture that still runs on high streets.
Draw a radius around a bayside store and a big slice of it lands in Port Phillip Bay. Draw one on the fringe and it covers paddocks that will be suburbs in five years but are empty tonight. In between, Melbourne's flat grid means a circle reaches a long way in every direction, including plenty of streets another store already serves.
We measured this on 150 zones built from official Victorian suburb boundaries, using the same engine that plans real campaigns. The full method is on the zone benchmark.
The median share of a covering circle that lands outside the zone it is meant to serve, on Victorian zones. Two thirds of the area, and the budget follows the area.
The same number for Amplaro's fitted Meta targeting, at a median 92.7% of the zone covered, from a median of 5 fitted circles per zone.
Victorian zones where a fixed 3 kilometre radius also misses 13% or more of the zone itself. The circle wastes money and still skips streets the store serves.
Fitted Google targeting on the same Victorian zones: a median 9.9% outside at 90.4% coverage. How a polygon becomes platform targeting is on zones into ad audiences, and the plain-language version of the problem is radius vs delivery zone.
Melbourne franchising leans hard on food, coffee and fitness, and its stores sit everywhere from Chapel Street shopfronts to greenfield centres in the west. The same campaign package has to work in both, with only the targeting changing.
High street stores still win on the street itself. Flyers and posters are ordered in the same flow as the ads, per store, from the print side of the platform.
A new store in a growth corridor imports like any other row, and every existing campaign is available to it on day one, fitted to its own new trade area. See rolling out.
The sector versions of this page start at franchise industries, from restaurants and QSR to gyms and fitness.
Head office builds campaign packages once: artwork in the brand font, offers, budgets, dates, guardrails. A Melbourne partner signs in, picks a campaign, sets a budget inside the limits, and is live in minutes on Meta and Google, with the store's own trade area as the audience. Organic posts to the store's own pages ride along in the same order.
Head office sees every campaign, every store and every dollar, including the stores that have launched nothing. The full flow is on how it works, and what the brand team keeps is on for head office.
It pays for the water. A circle around a store in Brighton, St Kilda or Williamstown puts a large slice of its area, and so its budget, over Port Phillip Bay. Fitted zone targeting follows the coastline instead, so the spend stays on streets the store actually serves. On 150 Victorian test zones, a covering circle put a median 66% of its area outside the zone.
Yes, and this is where a platform beats a briefing loop. A new store in a growth corridor imports like any other row in the spreadsheet, the partner gets an invite link, and the campaigns head office already built are available on day one, fitted to the new trade area. No new brief, no new agency round.
For targeting, yes. A high street store draws from the residential streets around it, in a shape set by the grid, the tram lines and the parks, not by distance alone. A fitted polygon can follow that shape. It also matters for print: flyers and posters are part of the same order flow, which suits strip retail where the shopfront still does real work.
Build the packages once from Melbourne and every store in the network activates them locally, in Melbourne or anywhere else. The per-city pages exist because the geography differs, not the product. The rollout view, guardrails and reporting are identical nationwide.
The hub for this topic is the franchise marketing platform guide, and the measured case against circles is the zone benchmark. Every city breaks a radius differently:
The benchmark says what happens on typical Victorian zones. The number that matters is yours, and measuring your own store shapes takes one demo.