The cost of local campaigns

Today's options

Three ways to run one local campaign.

Digital agency

The premium route

Built for big accounts, not for one store spending a few hundred a month. The retainer often beats the media budget, and a two-week promo takes days of emails to get live.

Setup feesMonthly retainerSlow turnaround

A$400–900 / month per storetypical management retainer, media budget on top

Freelancer

The flexible route

Every campaign is manual work at A$60–100 per hour: brief, build, review, launch. Quality varies per store, and head office never sees what ran.

Hourly billingNo brand controlVaries per store

A$250–800 / campaignper store, every single time

Do it yourself

The "free" route

Ads Manager was not built for a store owner with 20 spare minutes. No purchase pixel, wrong targeting, evenings lost. It looks free. It isn't.

No purchase pixelWrong targetingHours lost

The most expensive optionwasted ad spend plus the owner's time

The hidden waste

DIY mistakes cost more than any retainer.

The same two mistakes show up in almost every self-managed franchise account. Both burn money quietly for months.

Targeting the whole country

Pick "Australia" instead of a radius and the budget is spread over 26 million people. Only the few thousand inside the delivery zone can ever order.

The Amplaro fix: every campaign is locked to a radius around the store address. Partners move a slider, they cannot pick a country.

No purchase pixel

Without purchase tracking, ads optimise for clicks, not orders. Nobody can say what a campaign returned, so money keeps flowing to ads that only feel good.

The Amplaro fix: head office connects tracking once, at network level. Every campaign optimises for purchases and reports real revenue per store.

	Agency	Freelancer	DIY	Amplaro
Cost per store	A$400–900 / month	A$250–800 / campaign	"Free" + wasted spend	From about A$12–20 / month
Time to launch	Days to weeks	Days	Hours (and evenings)	2 minutes
Purchase tracking	Usually	Depends who you hire	Almost never	Always, set up once by HQ
Geo targeting	Yes	Usually	Often a whole country	Locked to a store radius
On brand	Mostly	Varies per store	No	Always, HQ approves everything
HQ visibility	Per-store reports, if any	None	None	Whole network, live

Agency and freelancer figures are typical market rates for single-location paid social / search management in Australia; actual quotes vary. Amplaro per-store figure is the brand plan divided by locations (see pricing). Franchise partners never pay for Amplaro, only their own media budget.

The network view

Now multiply by every store.

For one store the difference is annoying. For a network it is a budget line.

A 50-store network, per year

Say half the stores use an agency or freelancer (A$400 per store per month), the other half do it themselves and waste a third of a A$300 monthly budget.

~A$120,000agency and freelancer fees per year (25 stores × A$400 × 12)

~A$30,000ad spend wasted by DIY stores per year (25 stores × ~A$100 × 12)

~A$14,000Amplaro Growth plan per year, for the entire network, partners pay nothing

Roughly A$150,000 of fees and waste, replaced by one platform fee. The saving is not the software price. The saving is everything the software makes unnecessary.

Book a demo See pricing