Illinois PPC Agency

Our Illinois PPC Management Game Plans

PPC management refers to creating and optimizing Illinois paid ads campaigns. That is an incredibly simple explanation though, so let's dive a little deeper.

To provide professional PPC management, a PPC advertising company for Illinois often starts by getting to know your company and its business model. This information helps determine the next steps, since the way you'd approach paid ads for a local Illinois small business is much different from how you'd handle it for an ecommerce brand.

Service providers in Illinois, for example, are often only searching for quality leads. This can be accomplished through paid ads that generates traffic to an optimized landing page or sales funnel. If those digital assets don't yet exist, or need substantial improvement, then you could start with Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms.

In contrast, ecommerce brands are most likely to be interested in online sales. Pay-per-click advertising can be used to build traffic to an optimized product or category page. In some cases, it might even make sense to include Google Shopping Campaigns. We've even utilized sales funnels to help sell products, subscriptions, and services.

The next step in Illinois PPC ads management is understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale. For paid advertising to be effective, most Illinois paid ad firms will implement email collection strategies, such as squeeze pages or lead magnets. For ad budgets over $1,000/mo, it often makes sense to integrate with Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam to better understand ad attribution and reporting.

To be successful with PPC advertising, your Illinois organization should utilize multiple advertising strategies and marketing tools. Some of the best paid advertising packages in Illinois include:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase revenue for your Illinois business through qualified leads or online sales.
• Better understand ad attribution through the integration of third-party attribution software.
• Showcase social proof through case studies, white papers, video testimonials, and other factors.
• Engage users in story creation, email collection, and user generated content.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Our PPC management firm is happy to provide Aurora, Bloomington, Chicago, Decatur, Elgin, Joliet, Naperville, Palatine, Peoria, Rockford, Schaumburg, Skokie, and Springfield businesses with expert PPC advertising consulting packages.

Pricing for Illinois Paid Ads Management

The cost of our PPC management packages is calculated based on the monthly time allocation you request for your campaigns. Our PPC ads management plans start at the price listed below, however, we are open to discussing an increased budget if your ad spend or service requirements are higher.

How Paid Advertising Helps Illinois Organizations

Traffic increases almost instantly with Illinois paid advertising.

Whether a traffic increase results in higher conversions depends on your ads, landing pages, and business model.

The first recommendation we offer to Illinois small businesses interested in running paid advertising is to start slowly.

Before diving into paid ads or scaling your ad campaigns, make sure you have realistic goals, a working sales funnel, and the ability to gather actionable data.

If you're not getting conversions, don't blame Facebook or Google. The issue is often in the ad creatives, campaign settings, or sales process.

When everything comes together, paid advertising can be an invaluable addition to the online advertising game plan of your Illinois small business. It's important to keep in mind that increased traffic does not always translate into more conversions.

How We Manage Illinois PPC

With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for nearby businesses in Illinois, we are a team of paid advertising specialists. Take advantage of our experience across dozens of business industries to help generate traffic and conversions to your Illinois digital assets.

Keyword Research

In the context of paid advertising, you'll find keyword research mostly relates to search network campaigns on the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms. After all, Bing and Google only show ads based on what people search for.

For example, a person searching for a roofing company in Illinois might search "Illinois Roofer" on a search engine. As a paid advertising manager for that Illinois roofing company, targeting that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the Illinois roofing company needs to expand their advertising reach? Researching keywords would be necessary for the solution.

The next steps might involve the paid ads manager discussing with the Illinois roofing company what types of services they want to target more often and within what geographic areas. It might also require some broadening of the keyword targeting.

For instance, the PPC manager might discover high search volume for "Illinois roofing companies" or even "Illinois roof repair." The first phrase targets the plural form of the business industry within Illinois. The second phrase is targeting a slightly different service, which might result in a more lucrative roof replacement project if the repair work is extensive.

You can also benefit from keyword research when building out negative keyword lists. You can use these to prevent your PPC advertising from showing in search queries that you know won't convert.

A person searching for "free roof repair work" or "how to advertise to roofing companies" is unlikely to buy a roof replacement. However, they might see your paid ads if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

As you can see, no matter how obvious your keyword research needs might be at the start of building out your campaign, they become more complicated as you begin to scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend.

Audience Research

Audience research is often mentioned as part of scaling social media ads on Facebook and Instagram in Illinois paid advertising campaigns. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

Let's go over a little history on audience research and targeting within the Facebook Ads platform.

Facebook custom audiences were heavily relied upon by Illinois's PPC advertising managers in the past. As a matter of fact, one of the most appealing features of Facebook Ads was its ability to collect data on users, which advertisers in Illinois flocked to take advantage of.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

When Apple released its iOS 14.5 update, they included a pop up message that allowed users to easily opt out of personalized ad tracking. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices in Illinois and beyond. Even ad attribution reporting was affected.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most Illinois ad firms. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

Though there will still be plenty of Illinois paid advertising companies using custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it for yourself. Every few months Facebook rolls out updates that gradually remove lesser-used interest-based targeting options. They even keep changing out "Advantage Detailed Targeting" is pushed in the ad set creation.

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within Illinois ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

Landing Page Creation & Optimization

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your Illinois paid ads campaigns.

When we take on the management of a paid advertising campaign in Illinois, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. In this review, we consider the following factors and more:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page.

Please, don't spend money on Illinois paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices!

Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your Illinois sales pitch.

Conversion Funnel Development

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from Illinois. While managing their website advertising we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your Illinois organization isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

If you do decide to implement a funnel, take your time at it. Doing this type of work yourself can take weeks of training, whether you learn it at home by yourself or at a technical school in Illinois. It can take years of experience to master funnels, however. You can save yourself some time by searching for a PPC ads management firm, like WebCitz, to handle the heavy lifting!

Conversion Rate Optimization

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services throughout Illinois.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 sweatshirt in Illinois on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 Illinois residents that visit your website you sell 1 sweatshirt.
3. You have a $0.50 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person in Illinois that visits your website you spend 50 cents.
4. To sell 1 sweatshirt, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $50. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 2x, meaning for every dollar spent in paid ads you get two dollars in return.

For most Illinois businesses, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable unless the margins were great.

To improve the situation, you hire a PPC advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 sweatshirts. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling those sweatshirts.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your Illinois paid advertising.

Ad Creation

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads in Illinois, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out attractive ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a great ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people in Illinois.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience (in Illinois and beyond) has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

This is one of the benefits of working with a PPC management firm that helps Illinois businesses, since we are proponents of testing new ad creatives regularly.

Ad Attribution Consulting

Knowing your ad attribution is important. If you don't know what ad attribution is, it is the process of determining which advertisement resulted in the conversion you experienced on your Illinois website or funnel.

You might be suffering from ad attribution concerns and not even know it.

Do you rely on Facebook Ads or Google Ads to tell you which campaigns, ad sets, and ads are performing the best?

If so, you are relying on incomplete data to form critical decisions about when to turn off or scale an ad.

For Illinois ecommerce businesses running on Shopify, we recommend you look at ad attribution companies like Triple Whale or Northbeam to get a much clearer picture of your ad attribution.

For Illinois content-based websites, or ecommerce websites in platforms other than Shopify, check out ad attribution companies like Wicked Reports or Hyros to get a better idea for how well each of your paid ads campaigns are doing.

Types of Paid Ads for Illinois PPC Campaigns

The options for running paid advertising for your Illinois company are numerous. Let's discuss some of the most common PPC advertising being run within various business industries in Illinois.

Local Marketing throughout Illinois

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run nearby ads for your Illinois business. One platform may be more effective for your nearby business in Illinois than another. It is important to try out every available option to see which works best for your needs. Let's talk about a few local advertising choices.

Google is going to offer two options.

In the first case, you can run traditional Google Ads, possibly using the newer Performance Max campaign type. This is a very dynamic ad campaign type which utilizes multiple headlines, images, videos, and service locations to allow the Google algorithm to find the best combination of assets to bring you customers in Illinois. We often use Performance Max campaigns for professional services companies in and around Illinois, such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians.

The second option from Google, if you are in a qualifying business industry, is to check out their Local Service Ads. Using Local Service Ads, you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform generates. We often use Google Local Service Ads for home services contractors in Illinois, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

You can also use Facebook Ads to target people in your local Illinois area. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to Illinois, or specific ZIP codes within Illinois. For all types of Illinois businesses, we often use Facebook Ads.

Social Ads for Illinois Companies

Pretty much any online ad you see on a social network website is going to qualify as a social ad.

The trick to social ads is keeping the ad creatives fresh. The performance of your campaign will gradually decline if you do not rotate your ad creatives every couple of weeks. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative changes.

The best part of social media ads is you can target audiences that have never thought of your product or service, or perhaps just aren't thinking about it now. The opposite is true when you run search advertising since your ads will only show when someone is actively looking for what your Illinois small business has to offer.

It can also be a curse, as conversion rates often drop when people aren't closer to making an immediate purchase.

Search Ads for Illinois Businesses

If you know people are looking online for the products or services you offer, you'll want to invest in search advertisements.

There are some people out there who refer to this as Illinois Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. There are different ways to explain search ads, which are advertisements displayed on search engines' search results pages.

If you've been running search engine advertising on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

Display Ads throughout Illinois

There are display ads on message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even local Illinois news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

Retargeting Ads in Illinois

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your Illinois website, landing page, or sales funnel.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

Almost any ad platform can be used for retargeting ads.

Shopping Ads for Illinois Ecommerce Organizations

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your Illinois storefront.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

Video Ads for Illinois Businesses

You can run video ads on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other social networking websites.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your Illinois paid advertising campaigns.

Free PPC Calculators for Illinois PPC Managers

Our digital advertisers are so excited about managing Illinois's paid advertising campaigns that they developed some helpful paid ads calculators for you!

• ROAS Calculator
• Cost Per Acquisition Calculator
• Churn Rate Calculator

View Other PPC Tools

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Illinois Paid Ads Services

Let's work together on paid advertising for your Illinois organization! As a full-service PPC ads management firm targeting Illinois, we have multiple internal teams focused on search engine marketing, social media marketing, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. This is not true of all Illinois PPC management firms, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. For those Illinois paid ads firms, campaign optimizations and creative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.

Choosing a paid ad company for your Illinois organization is not an easy task. With more than 18 years of experience, you know you can trust the paid ads tactics and plans we suggest for your Illinois business. These are often the same paid ads plans we use for our own lead generation.

Illinois businesses should choose our PPC advertising firm because they feel confident we are the right team. Consider our paid ads experts for the following reasons:

• We have been in business since 2004, which means we have more than 18 years of experience.
• We rely heavily on sales funnels and paid advertising to shore up our organic search placements.
• We do not outsource Illinois website advertising packages, including PPC management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services since we have our own internal advertising team.
• During normal business hours, you will likely receive an answer within a few rings from one of our teammates.

Let's discuss what our paid ads consultants can offer your Illinois company! We often provide complete paid ads management plans to Illinois small businesses, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger Illinois corporations to fill in missing skill sets.

Our team would appreciate the opportunity to be considered when your Illinois company needs a PPC marketing company. To start a discussion with the helpful staff at our PPC agency, send us an email or give us a call if you have any follow-up questions.

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