How Bicycle turned national ads into locally flavored campaigns that cut CPO by 22% for Papa Johns
The challenge
Budget waste and the franchise targeting gap
Papa Johns faced a familiar challenge for franchise brands. With hundreds of stores across the UK, coverage varied significantly. Some cities had several locations, while other regions had none. Their Meta campaigns, however, treated the entire country the same.
This led to impressions being served in areas without a nearby store, which created avoidable spend. Clicks from people outside the delivery range added little value, and the creative lacked the local context needed to improve efficiency.
This situation represents the franchise targeting gap. It is the distance between where ads appear and where a business can actually fulfill orders. For brands that operate on tight margins, this gap affects both efficiency and overall profitability. When targeting does not align with coverage, optimization alone cannot solve the issue.
The solution
Fresh local offers, served to the right audience using Hunch localization
Bicycle partnered with Hunch to introduce dynamic localization, allowing national creative to automatically reference nearby stores, local offers, and more relevant calls to action. Instead of one message for the entire UK, the team could serve localized variations tailored to each viewer’s closest Papa Johns location.
All Papa Johns store locations were mapped and connected to Meta through local inventory feeds. Existing offer-led creative was adapted so that copy and CTAs updated automatically based on location. This removed the need to manually build a large number of creative variations.
Dynamic localized ads were introduced into Papa Johns’ always-on performance campaigns and ran alongside standard creative. This approach allowed the team to measure the incremental impact of localization within the same budget conditions and understand whether relevance improved cost per order and conversion rates.
The results
Local flavor delivered a 22% cut in Cost Per Order
Localized creative delivered a 22 % lower cost per order compared to the generic UK-wide approach. Papa Johns gained clarity on how spend and orders aligned within their franchise network and identified where media investment drove the strongest results.
As impressions shifted toward areas with real store coverage, budget waste decreased, and overall efficiency improved. Franchise operators also gained better visibility into how campaigns performed in their territories.
Dynamic localization is now a permanent part of Papa Johns’ Meta strategy. The team is expanding the approach by testing new layouts, calls to action, imagery, and additional dynamic elements.
