Franchise Development Lead Generation Source Adoption Rates
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
April 30, 2025 – Looking back at usage rates of the top franchise development lead generation channels from 2022-2025, franchisors have diversified their sources in response to many changes in the ecosystem.
The chart above shows changes in usage among paid sources by franchise development teams, not the volume of leads or size of budget by channel.
Google has gained further as the most widely-used lead generation source, due in some part to the smaller real estate it provides for organic listings. Most all franchise development teams are using Google to some extent, and expect to use it more in 2025, one year after the introduction of AI overviews in search May 2024.
Meta has shown the fastest adoption rate, from 50% of teams to almost 77% of teams expecting to use the source in 2025. This shows a big gain despite the “ask apps not to track” feature introduced to devices using iOS in April 2021 which cost the company $10 billion in ad revenue in that year.
The loss of tracking hampered targeting for all 3rd party sources, but Google and Meta retain the advantage of their own tracking options, where users allow tracking.
Franchise development teams have diversified their paid channels for franchise lead generation significantly over the last several years.
Franchise portals, after almost thirty years of providing franchise leads, are still employed by most franchise development teams, and grew from 61.9% in 2024 to expected usage of 68.6% in 2025, an increase of 11%. This is the highest growth rate among the top four sources in expected usage in 2025. Franchise Insights is sponsored by Franchise Ventures, a leading supplier of leads from portals.
After rapid growth in 2023, LinkedIn stalled somewhat, with expected usage in 2025 just above 2023 levels.
Finally, TikTok is expected to grow the most from 2024 to 2025, despite the imminent threat of a ban from U.S. app stores, and a growing number of state-by-state bans over insufficient content controls over content pushed to children. About 22% of franchise systems expect to experiment with TikTok in 2025.
Despite a challenging business climate in 2023, franchises increasing their expansion plans (8.3%) included all tiers of system sizes, and 98% of them increased their spending in 2024 across the four largest third-party advertising platforms.
Franchise portals, after almost thirty years of providing franchise leads, are still utilized by most franchise development teams.
Supporting the validity of data from the Franchise Insights 2025 Franchise Lead Generation Sources survey, a broad cross-section of franchise development teams participated, from emerging systems to well-established franchises with many thousands of units.
FranchiseInsights.com surveys franchisors periodically to get a pulse on the industry, provide benchmarking and identify franchise development best practices. This survey was conducted in January 2025.
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Published on Wednesday, April 30th, 2025.