Why Do Prospects Make Post-Inquiry Visits to Franchise Development Websites?
By: Michael Alston for Franchise Insights
July 23, 2025 — Most prospects who request information on franchise portal websites become a referral visit to the franchisor’s website afterward. In our most recent surveys from February to June 2025, about 64.3% of portal lead submitters made post-inquiry visits to the corresponding franchise development websites of their interest.
What intent drives post-inquiry referrals from portals to the franchisor’s website?
We also routinely ask prospects why they visited franchisor site(s) after submitting an inquiry at a franchise directory website, or portal, to gain insight into this behavior. The overwhelming response, at 54.7%, was “I was very interested and just wanted to learn more.” Another 28.4% wanted to “prepare before having a conversation” with franchise representatives. For 11.6% of respondents, the portals, which are intentionally designed to generate awareness and consideration of options and make connections, didn’t provide “sufficient information,” leading to a franchisor site visit.
These highly-interested “referred” prospects may get attributed to the franchisor’s website, even though they originated on the portal. This is a positive outcome, but it may lead to improper attribution of interested prospects to the “last touch” rather than the portal that was the source of the prospect lead.
Almost 55% of inquiring prospects proceeded to visit the corresponding franchise development websites because they were “very interested and just wanted to learn more.”
What explains this referral phenomenon?
Recent franchise brand awareness data shows that less than 10% of prospects are “very familiar” with the opportunities they inquire about on franchise portals, and about 6.7% are “somewhat familiar.” About 46.7% of prospects are introduced to an unfamiliar franchise on a portal visit.
Brand awareness and referral value are keys to why third-party sites like franchise portals are important to franchise development, especially as consumers spend more of their time on fragmented social media, streaming platforms, and increasingly engage in AI-enhanced search.. Prospects who take the time to research a franchise and visit its website demonstrate a level of interest and intent that can lead to more productive conversations with franchise representatives.
This additional referral value is a substantial benefit that should be considered in determining return on investment in portals.
Over 28% of portal inquirers said they wanted to better prepare themselves before having a conversation with a franchise representative.
The “Mystery Shop” survey is conducted monthly by FranchiseInsights.com from a sample of franchise inquirers across the Franchise Ventures franchise lead generation platform. The data presented here is from February through June 2025.
Franchise Ventures is the leading franchise lead-generation platform for potential franchisees to thousands of growing franchise systems in the United States and Canada. Its franchise lead generation brands include Franchise.com, Franchise Solutions, Franchise Gator, Franchise Opportunities, Franchise For Sale, SmallBusinessStartup.com and BusinessBroker.net, and together they provide the largest aggregation of prospective franchise buyers in the U.S.
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Published on Wednesday, July 23rd, 2025.