Chicago PPC Agency

Our Chicago, IL PPC Ads Management Tactics

Paid Ads Management refers to creating and optimizing Chicago paid advertising services. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

To provide expert PPC management, a paid ads agency for Chicago 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 PPC advertising for a local Chicago business is much different from how you'd handle it for an ecommerce brand.

Local service providers in Chicago, for instance, are often only interested in good leads. Through paid advertising, traffic can be driven 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.

Alternatively, ecommerce brands tend to be interested in online sales. Using paid advertising, you can grow traffic to a page optimized for products or categories. Google Shopping Campaigns might even make sense in some cases. Our team has even used sales funnels to help sell products and subscriptions.

Understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale Chicago paid ads is the next step. For paid ads to be effective, most Chicago paid ad agencies will implement email collection tactics, 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 paid advertising, your Chicago business should utilize multiple advertising tactics and marketing tools. Some of the best paid advertising services in Chicago strive to:

• Get traffic from search engines, social networks, and third-party websites to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc).
• Increase revenue for your Chicago organization through qualified leads or online sales.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Present social proof through case studies, white papers, and video testimonials.
• Collect email addresses, create user-generated content, and nurture relationships.
• Place ad creatives across various ad placements and media formats to see which performs best.

In addition to managing Chicago-area PPC campaigns, our team also offers Aurora, Bloomington, Decatur, Elgin, Joliet, Naperville, Palatine, Peoria, Rockford, Schaumburg, Skokie, and Springfield small businesses and large corporations a premium PPC management service.

Pricing for Chicago, IL Paid Ads Management

The price of our PPC management packages is based on the amount of time you want us to dedicate to your campaigns each month. Listed below you will find our starting price for PPC ads management, but we can discuss an increased budget if you have a higher ad spend or service requirements.

How Paid Advertising Helps Chicago, IL Organizations

Traffic increases almost instantly with Chicago paid advertising.

It is entirely dependent on the quality of your ad creatives, landing pages, and business model whether or not traffic increases lead to conversions.

The first recommendation we offer to Chicago 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.

Don't blame Facebook or Google if you don't get conversions. In many cases, the problem lies in the ad creative, campaign settings, or sales process.

When everything comes together, paid advertising can be an invaluable addition to the online advertising game plan of your Chicago company. Remember, more traffic doesn't always mean more conversions!

How We Manage Chicago, IL Paid Ads

With in-depth knowledge of the latest PPC trends for local businesses in Chicago, we are a team of PPC advertising consultants. We have experience across dozens of business industries, so we can help you improve traffic and conversions to your Chicago 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, search ads are exclusively shown based on what people search for on Google or Bing.

If you are looking for a roofing company in Chicago, you might search "Chicago Roofer" on Google. As a PPC advertising manager for that Chicago roofing company, targeting that exact phrase wouldn't require in-depth keyword research.

What if, however, that exact match keyword wasn't producing enough search volume and the Chicago roofing company wanted to increase their traffic and conversions? To solve the problem, keyword research would be required.

Typically, the paid advertising manager will discuss with the Chicago roofing company what types of services to target more often. There may also be a need to broaden the keyword targeting.

As an example, the Illinois PPC manager might find that "Cicero, IL roofing companies" and "Chicago roof repair" have high search volumes. The first phrase targets a location nearby Chicago that might still be within the company's service area. 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 paid advertising from showing in search queries that you know won't convert.

A person looking 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 advertising if you are using broad keyword targeting without any negative keywords like "free" or "advertise".

You can see that as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend, the needs for keyword research become more complex.

Audience Research

In Chicago paid ads campaigns, audience research is often discussed in the context of scaling social media ads. Google Ads and Bing Ads also offer audience targeting options.

Let's take a look at audience research and targeting within Facebook Ads.

Chicago paid advertising managers used Facebook's custom audiences extensively in the past. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which Chicago advertisers lined up to exploit.

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

Apple's iOS 14.5 upgrade included a pop-up message that lets users opt out of personalized ad tracking. As a result, Facebook had difficulty tracking mobile device behavior. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

For most Chicago advertising firms, machine learning algorithms greatly reduced the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences. With such sophisticated algorithms, it's often more harmful to choose your own interests compared to letting Facebook figure it out for you.

Though there will still be plenty of Chicago 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.

It's not to say audience research and targeting are going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within Chicago ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

Landing Page Optimization

An important factor in the success of your Chicago paid ads campaign is the landing page.

Our first step when managing a paid advertising campaign in Chicago involves reviewing the landing pages for best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Do you have a headline that emphasizes benefits?
• Is there an image above the fold?
• What is the quality of the content? Is it well written?
• Do I have immediate access to a lead form?
• What is the visibility of the call to action?
• How quickly does the page load?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

Designing and developing a quality landing page involves so many factors.

Make sure your landing page follows best practices before you spend money on Chicago paid advertising!

Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. For continuous improvement, run A/B testing every few months.

Including a Conversion Funnel

You might consider building out one or more sales funnels instead of a landing page. To boost leads, build email audiences, and even make online purchases, we rely on sales funnels.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from Chicago. While managing their digital marketing 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 Chicago business 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 Chicago. It can take years of experience to master funnels, however. You can save yourself some time by looking for a PPC management agency, like WebCitz, to handle the heavy lifting!

Conversion 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 Chicago.

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

1. You sell a $100 sweatshirt in Chicago on your website.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 Chicago 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 Chicago that visits your website you spend 50 cents.
4. To sell 1 sweatshirt, you need 100 clicks from paid ads, 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 advertising you get two dollars in return.

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

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising agency 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 Chicago 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 Chicago, 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 great 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 good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people in Chicago.

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 Chicago 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 paid ads management agency that helps Chicago small 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 Chicago site or funnel.

You might be suffering from ad attribution glitches 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 Chicago 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 Chicago 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 advertising campaigns are doing.

Types of Paid Ads for Chicago, IL PPC Campaigns

The options for running paid advertising for your Chicago business are numerous. The following are some of Chicago's most common paid advertisements options.

Local Marketing throughout Chicago

You can use nearly any advertising platform to run nearby ads for your Chicago business. You may find greater success on one platform over another depending on the nature of your nearby Chicago organization. You should try out every option available to see which suits you best. Let's talk about a few local area advertising choices.

From Google, you'll have two options.

As a first step, you can run traditional Google Adwords, possibly using their newer Performance Max campaign type. With this ad campaign type, the Google algorithm can find the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you customers in Chicago. Chicago professionals such as accountants, lawyers, dentists, and physicians frequently use Performance Max campaigns.

Alternatively, if your business qualifies, Google offers a Local Service Ads option. 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 Chicago, like plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers.

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

Social Media Advertising for Chicago Small Businesses

Almost all online ads you see on social media networks qualify as social ads.

Maintaining fresh ad creatives is key to social media ads. Without rotating ad creatives every few weeks, your campaign performance will slowly deteriorate. It might be necessary to look at weekly ad creative changes for campaigns with higher spending.

Using social media marketing allows you to reach audiences who have never thought of your product or service, or aren't thinking about it right now. It's quite the opposite when you run search engine marketing since you only get to show them when someone searches for what you offer in Chicago.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

Search Ads for Chicago Businesses

You should invest in search advertising if you know people are looking online for your products or services.

Some people refer to this as Chicago Search Engine Marketing, or SEM. This is just a different way of explaining search engine advertising, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine.

If you have been running search ads on Google for a while and have been successful, consider copying your campaigns over to Bing Ads. In an October 2022 study from StatCounter, Bing was the primary search engine used by approximately 3.57% of online users.

Display Ads throughout Chicago

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

Google Ads and Bing Ads commonly offer these campaign types.

With display ads, all you need are a few different sizes of ad creatives. 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 for Chicago Organizations

Your Chicago website, landing page, or sales funnel won't convert everyone on the first visit.

Retargeting ads are almost always recommended to help bring people back to your website after they have weighed their options.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

Shopping Ads for Chicago Ecommerce Small Businesses

It was Google Shopping Campaigns that popularized this form of search advertising.

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.

By using these tools, you can provide Google Ads with accurate product data, including title, SKU, image, price, and availability. Then, your products will be displayed at the top of search results based on the right types of search queries.

Video Ads within Chicago

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

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

It's necessary to have a working Facebook Ads account to run video ads on Facebook or Instagram.

The conversion potential of video ads is excellent on both platforms. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

You should consider incorporating video ads into your paid advertising campaigns in Chicago if you have the budget to do so.

Free Paid Ads Calculators for Chicago, IL PPC Managers

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

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

View More PPC Tools

Why Choose WebCitz to Manage Your Chicago, IL Paid Ads Strategies

Let's work together on paid advertising for your Chicago business! We are a comprehensive PPC management agency targeting Chicago with multiple internal teams focused on social ads, sales funnel development, and ad creative testing. This is not true of all Chicago PPC management companies, since most only have a single person handling all the tasks. For those Chicago paid ads firms, campaign optimizations and creative ideas might not be tested often enough to bring about the results you need.

While researching PPC advertising firms for your Chicago company, there are many factors to consider. Having over 18 years of experience, you can trust our paid ads tactics and plans for Chicago businesses. These are often the same paid ads plans we use for our own lead generation.

In addition, you should choose us as your paid advertising company because you are confident we can help your Chicago company grow. Our PPC specialists are a good option for numerous reasons:

• Having been in business since 2004, we have more than 18 years of experience.
• We rely heavily on paid advertising to bring in traffic from keywords we don't yet rank for organically.
• Since we have an internal advertising team, we do not outsource Chicago online advertising services, such as PPC management, sales funnel development, or ad creative services.
• During normal business hours, you will likely receive an answer within a few rings from one of our teammates.

Let's discuss what our PPC experts can offer your Chicago company! We often provide complete PPC advertising management services to Chicago organizations, but we can also augment the marketing department of larger Chicago corporations to fill in missing skill sets.

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

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