I've personally managed Meta Ads for hundreds of brands big and small
Small geographies mean small audiences, fast fatigue, and creative that has to feel like it belongs to that place.
Work withLocal accounts have constraints that national advertisers never encounter, and generic advice quietly assumes they do not exist.
The same three ads have run for eight months to the same twenty thousand people, and performance has been sliding for six of them.
Every location runs its own version of everything, so nothing is learned once and applied everywhere.
The advertising is generic enough to run anywhere, which is exactly why it feels like it belongs nowhere.
Nobody can tell which locations paid advertising actually helped, because the measurement stops at a click.
Everything about small audiences pushes in the same direction: creative matters more and lasts less time.
With a small addressable audience, people see your ads often. That accelerates fatigue and makes creative refresh a schedule rather than an occasional project. Most underperforming local accounts are not badly targeted, they are simply repeating themselves to a population that has already heard it.
The efficient model for multiple sites is a shared creative system with genuine local specifics layered on: the actual place, the actual team, recognisable detail. That gives you the economics of central production and the resonance of something made locally, without producing everything from scratch for every location.
A national brand cannot mention the roundabout everyone complains about. You can. Local recognition is the one thing you have that larger competitors cannot buy, and generic stock imagery throws it away for no reason.
Aggregate reporting hides which sites are working. If the outcome happens offline, some way of connecting advertising to what happened in the building has to exist, even a rough one. Otherwise you are allocating budget across locations on instinct.
I've personally managed Meta Ads for hundreds of brands big and small
Structure, geography, creative and measurement, plus a frequency check that usually explains most of what is going wrong.
A shared creative approach designed to be adapted per location rather than rebuilt, so production stays affordable.
Get location level outcomes visible, so budget can move toward the sites where advertising genuinely helps.
A production cadence matched to how fast your audiences actually tire, rather than to a quarterly marketing calendar.
What founders say about working with John on Meta campaigns
We'd been told our category was too niche for Meta to work properly. John rebuilt our creative approach around who actually buys from us, and the difference was obvious within weeks. No jargon, no endless meetings, just work.
Jason GrimaFounder, Swallow Co.
What I value most is the honesty. John tells me when an idea won't work and why, rather than nodding along and billing me for it. He's genuinely part of the business now, not a supplier I chase for updates.
Sandra Roycroft-DavisFounder, Slimpod
Often yes, but with different expectations. Small audiences mean lower budgets, faster fatigue and more emphasis on creative variety than on clever targeting. What does not work is running a small radius the way you would run a national campaign and wondering why performance decays.
Usually not. Separate accounts fragment your data and multiply admin. Structuring by location within one account keeps learning shared while letting you see and control each site's performance.
Imperfectly, which is true of all offline attribution. Options range from simple, such as asking at point of sale, to more involved, such as uploading offline conversions back to Meta. Something rough and consistent beats nothing, and it beats an elaborate system nobody maintains.
Possibly, and I would rather say so honestly than take a fee that cannot pay for itself. My fees are fixed rather than a percentage of spend, so there is a level below which hiring me does not make commercial sense for you.
Tell me how many sites you run, what you're spending and how you currently judge whether it's working. I'll come back with an honest view on whether I can help.