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Pay Per Click

Leads This Month, Not Next Quarter

Paid search is the only channel that can put qualified leads in your pipeline within a fortnight. That speed is genuinely valuable — when a crew is idle, when a new location needs volume, when seasonal demand arrives early — and it is why paid usually runs alongside SEO rather than instead of it. Most Chicago clients see traffic and leads inside the first two to four weeks after launch.

It is also the channel where money disappears fastest when nobody is watching. Broad match on a $40 click, no negative keyword list, ads pointing at a homepage, conversion tracking that counts page views as leads — each is common, and together they can burn a monthly budget in a week with nothing to show. The management is the product. The ad account is just where it happens.

Most small to mid-sized Chicago businesses invest $1,000 - $5,000 per month in ad spend.

Find out what a lead actually costs in your category

What is included

Everything in a Pay Per Click engagement

Google Ads search campaigns

Built around commercial intent, with the negative keyword list treated as a primary deliverable. Most wasted spend is not bad bidding, it is showing up for searches that were never going to buy.

Local Service Ads and Google Guaranteed

For eligible trades these sit above everything else and charge per lead rather than per click. Setup, license and insurance verification, and dispute management for the leads that were not real.

Meta ads for demand generation

Facebook and Instagram for services people do not search for until they need them urgently. Lead ads and creative testing where the buyer has to be shown the problem before they will look for a solution.

Landing pages built to convert

Dedicated pages matched to the ad, fast, single-purpose. Sending paid traffic to a homepage is the most expensive habit in small business advertising.

Conversion tracking that counts real leads

Calls over a qualifying duration, submitted forms, booked appointments. Not clicks, not page views, not the numbers that make a report look better than the bank account.

Continuous testing

Ad copy, landing pages, audiences, bid strategies and dayparting. An account nobody has touched in a quarter is an account quietly getting more expensive.

How it runs

The process

  1. Strategy and competitor analysis

    What competitors are bidding on, what they are paying, what your lead is worth, and what a viable cost per acquisition looks like in your market. If the numbers do not work we say so before you fund an account.

  2. Account architecture

    Campaign and ad group structure built around intent and geography, with conversion tracking and call tracking configured before anything goes live. Structure decided up front is what makes optimisation possible later.

  3. Ads and landing pages

    Ad copy written against the specific search, matched to a landing page that continues the same promise. Message match between ad and page is the cheapest conversion improvement available.

  4. Launch controlled

    Tight match types and a constrained budget for the first fortnight while search term data accumulates. Early spend buys information; we spend it deliberately rather than letting the platform decide.

  5. Optimise on search terms

    Weekly search term review, negatives added, bids adjusted, underperformers cut. This is the ongoing work that separates a managed account from a running one.

  6. Report against cost per job

    Monthly reporting on spend, leads, cost per lead and, where your data allows, cost per booked job. Impressions and click-through rate are diagnostics, not results.

What usually goes wrong

The problems we find in ppc accounts

Broad match with no negatives

Google will happily spend a roofing budget on "roofing jobs hiring" and "roof repair DIY". Without a negative list built and maintained weekly, a meaningful share of spend goes to searches that were never customers.

Traffic pointed at the homepage

A visitor who searched "emergency AC repair Naperville" and lands on a homepage listing eight services has to work out where to go next. Most do not. Dedicated landing pages routinely double conversion rate at identical spend.

Tracking that counts the wrong thing

Accounts optimising toward a "conversion" that fires on a page view teach the algorithm to buy the wrong traffic. The reports look excellent and the phone stays quiet, which is the worst of both worlds.

Bidding against yourself on brand

Paying for clicks on your own business name when you already rank first organically is sometimes defensive and often just waste. It depends on whether competitors are bidding on you, and it should be a decision rather than a default.

Pay Per Click questions

How much should I budget for Google Ads in Chicago?
Most small to mid-sized Chicago businesses invest between $1,000 and $5,000 per month in ad spend, separate from management. The right number is driven by your cost per click and how many leads you need, not by a percentage rule: in a category where clicks run $8 you can learn a lot on $1,000, while roofing or legal terms at $40 to $80 a click need considerably more before the data means anything. We would rather run one tightly targeted campaign properly funded than four campaigns all starved.
What are Local Service Ads and should I use them?
Local Service Ads sit above the standard search ads and the map pack, carry the Google Guaranteed badge, and charge per lead rather than per click. For eligible trades — plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing, locksmiths and similar — they are usually the highest-intent placement available and often the cheapest real lead. The tradeoffs are that you must pass license and insurance verification, you have less control over targeting than a search campaign, and you will need to dispute the occasional junk lead to get credited. For most contractors we recommend running them alongside search rather than choosing between them.
How fast will I see leads after launch?
Most clients see traffic and leads within the first two to four weeks. The first fortnight is deliberately a learning period: match types stay tight, budget stays constrained, and we are buying search term data as much as clicks. Performance typically improves through months two and three as the negative list matures and the bidding has enough conversion history to work with. If an account is still not producing viable leads by month three, the problem is usually the offer, the landing page or the market economics rather than the campaign settings, and we will say which.
Should I run PPC and SEO at the same time?
For most local businesses, yes, and they do different jobs. Paid handles the demand that exists right now and gives you a lever you can pull when the schedule looks thin. Organic lowers your blended cost per lead over time and keeps producing when you dial spend down. They also inform each other usefully: paid search term data tells you within weeks which keywords actually convert, which is information that would otherwise take SEO six months to reveal. If the budget only supports one, the answer depends on whether you need leads now or cheaper leads later.
Do I keep the ad account if we stop working together?
Yes. The Google Ads account is created in your name and you retain full ownership and admin access, along with all of its history. That history has real value — conversion data, search term learnings, quality score built over months — and an agency that runs your ads inside their own MCC sub-account without granting you ownership is holding an asset that is rightfully yours. Ask any agency you are considering this question directly, and be wary of a vague answer.

PPC works hardest for

PPC by area

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Find out what a lead actually costs in your category

We will pull competitor spend and click costs for your market and tell you whether paid search makes financial sense before you fund an account.

Free Business Analysis or call (312) 544-0344