PPC Management Services · Chicago & Nationwide
Chicago PPC agency — paid search managed like it’s our own money
Digitalogicx is a pay per click agency in Chicago that gets measured on one thing: what a booked customer costs you. We take over Google Ads accounts that are quietly burning budget, cut the traffic that never had a chance of buying, and rebuild around the searches that actually close.
- Flat monthly fee — never a percentage of your ad spend
- Your Google Ads account, in your name, from day one
- Month-to-month after the first quarter
- Free written audit before you commit to anything
Get your free Google Ads audit
Two to three business days. Written, specific, and yours to keep whether you hire us or not.
We'll never call you six times. One reply, then it's your move.
Why accounts leak
Most of your budget is spent before anyone reaches your site
Google’s defaults are built to spend. Broad match with no negatives, automatic location targeting that counts “people interested in Chicago” as Chicago, search partners on, display expansion quietly enabled, and a Performance Max campaign eating half your budget with no visibility into where it went.
None of that is a bug. It’s the platform doing exactly what it’s designed to do when nobody pushes back. Our job as your PPC management agency in Chicago is to be the one pushing back — every week, in writing.
- Search terms nobody has reviewed since the account launched
- Conversions counting every form fill, including the spam
- Calls that ring but never get attributed to a keyword
- Budget split evenly across campaigns with wildly different returns
- Bidding on your own brand at full price with no incrementality test
What’s included
Everything in our PPC management services, itemized
One retainer. No line items that appear later, and no “that’s a separate scope” conversations six weeks in.
Account structure & rebuild
Campaigns organized around how you actually sell — by service line, margin, and geography — instead of whatever the previous agency inherited from the one before them.
Weekly search term mining
Someone reads the search terms report every single week and adds negatives. It is the least glamorous task in paid search and the one that saves the most money.
Conversion tracking that’s real
GA4 and Google Ads configured properly, phone calls tracked to the keyword, duplicate conversions removed, and closed deals imported back from your CRM so bidding optimizes toward revenue.
Ad copy written by a person
Responsive search ads built around your actual differentiators and objections, with pinned headlines where it matters. Tested continuously, not written once at kickoff and forgotten.
Landing pages, not just ads
We build and test the pages your ads point at. That’s the part most PPC agencies in Chicago hand back to you — and it’s usually where the campaign is actually losing.
Bid strategy & budget control
Smart bidding used where it earns its keep and overridden where it doesn’t. Budget moved toward what converts, with pacing checked often enough that you never find out in month-end reporting.
Remarketing that isn’t creepy
Audience lists segmented by how close someone got to buying, with frequency caps and exclusions so you stop paying to follow people who already became customers.
Reporting a human wrote
A monthly summary in plain English: what you spent, what it produced, what we changed and why, and what we’re doing next month. The dashboard is always there if you want to dig.
A strategist who answers
Direct line to the person in your account. Same-day replies during business hours, and a standing monthly call that you can cancel whenever there’s nothing worth discussing.
Where we run
Google Ads first, everything else where it earns a place
We don’t add a channel because it’s on a capabilities slide. If your buyers aren’t there, neither is your budget.
Google Search & Performance Max
The core of nearly every account we run. Search for intent you can name, Performance Max only once conversion data is clean enough to feed it — and always with brand excluded so it can’t take credit for traffic you already had.
Microsoft Advertising
Smaller volume, often meaningfully cheaper clicks, and a user base that skews older and more B2B. For a lot of Chicago manufacturers and professional services firms it quietly outperforms Google on cost per lead.
LinkedIn Ads
Expensive per click and worth it when you’re selling a $50k contract to a specific job title at a specific company size. Wasteful for almost everything else, and we’ll tell you which one you are.
Meta & paid social
Strong for consumer services, local demand generation, and retargeting people who bounced. We run it as demand capture support, not as a replacement for search.
Google Shopping & ecommerce
Feed hygiene first — titles, attributes, and product-level margins — because a Shopping campaign is only ever as good as the data underneath it.
Local Services Ads
For home services and legal in the Chicago metro, LSAs often sit above everything else on the page. We manage the screening, the budget, and — importantly — the dispute process for bad leads.
Pricing
What PPC management costs in Chicago, and why ours works this way
The going rate among Chicago paid search agencies is 10–20% of ad spend, usually with a floor around $1,000 a month. It’s a tidy model for the agency. The problem is what it rewards: the fastest way to grow revenue under percentage pricing is to convince you to spend more, whether or not spending more is the right call.
We quote a flat monthly fee based on the work involved — number of campaigns, platforms, markets, and how much landing page support you want. If we cut your spend in half and your lead volume holds, our fee doesn’t change and you keep the difference.
You’ll get an exact number after the audit, before any agreement. No range that mysteriously lands at the top once we’ve seen your budget.
TYPICALLY $1,500 – $2,500 / MO
Single market, one platform
A local or regional business running Google Ads in one metro. Usually the right starting point for a Chicago small business PPC account with under about $15k a month in spend.
TYPICALLY $2,500 – $4,500 / MO
Multi-platform or multi-location
Google plus Microsoft or paid social, several service lines, or a handful of locations with separate budgets. Includes ongoing landing page work.
TYPICALLY $4,500+ / MO
National or complex B2B
Nationwide campaigns, long sales cycles with CRM-side attribution, ecommerce feeds, or a Chicago B2B PPC program with several buyer segments running at once.
FREE
The audit
Genuinely free, genuinely useful, and yours to keep. Some people take it to their current agency and get it fixed there. That’s a fine outcome.
For context, US agencies typically charge 10–20% of ad spend, or a flat $1,500–$10,000 a month, with mid-market accounts clustering around $2,500–$7,500 and setup fees of $2,500–$10,000 on top. Our ranges sit inside that band, without the percentage and without the setup fee. Your quote comes after the audit and is fixed for the term.
Who this works for
Industries where we’ve done this before
Not an exhaustive list, and not a hard filter. But if you’re in one of these, we already know where the money usually leaks.
B2B & manufacturing
Low search volume, long cycles, and a handful of deals that matter enormously. The whole game is CRM-side attribution, because a form fill tells you almost nothing.
Home & commercial services
Speed to lead decides everything. We optimize for calls over forms, run tight service-area targeting, and fight the national lead aggregators on ZIP-level economics.
Legal & professional services
Some of the most expensive clicks in the country happen in the Loop. Intake quality and call handling matter more than bid strategy, and we’ll say so even though it isn’t our line item.
Ecommerce & DTC
Margin-aware bidding, feed quality, and a hard look at whether your blended acquisition cost actually supports the growth target somebody put in a spreadsheet.
SaaS & technology
Trial-to-paid is the only metric that counts. We optimize toward qualified activations rather than signups, which usually means fewer, better leads and an uncomfortable first month.
Healthcare & multi-location
Compliance-aware creative, per-location budgets that don’t cannibalize each other, and reporting a regional director can read without a translator.
Chicago, specifically
Working with a paid search agency that’s actually in Chicago
There’s no rule that says your Google Ads agency has to be down the street. Plenty of good work gets done remotely, and half our own clients are in other states. But when you’re choosing between a Chicago PPC agency and a firm three time zones away, a few practical things tip the scale.
Local knowledge shows up in small decisions. Whether to bid separately on the city versus the collar counties. How much a Naperville search is worth compared to an identical one in Pilsen. That “near me” behavior in a dense, transit-heavy city doesn’t look anything like it does in a sprawling sunbelt metro. That trade seasonality in Chicago is brutal and predictable — and that a roofer’s February budget should not look like their June budget.
There’s also the plain matter of being reachable. When something breaks — a landing page 500s at 8 AM, a competitor doubles their bids overnight, Google disapproves an ad the week of a promotion — you want someone who picks up. We’re at 320 W Ohio Street in River North, a short walk from the Merchandise Mart, and clients drop by. Not often, but the fact that they can changes the relationship.
If you’re searching for a pay per click management company in Chicago right now, you’re probably comparing several. Ask each of them the same four questions: how do you charge, who owns the account, who will actually be in it day to day, and what happens to my campaigns if I leave. The answers separate the field faster than any case study.
PPC FAQs
What people ask before hiring a PPC agency
How much should I spend on Google Ads to start?
Work backwards from your click cost, not from a round number. If clicks in your category run $12 and roughly one in twenty visitors becomes a lead, each lead costs about $240 in media. To get twenty leads a month you need somewhere near $5,000. In competitive Chicago categories — legal, cosmetic, commercial services — clicks can run $40 to $90, and the math moves accordingly. We’ll build that estimate with you during the audit using real auction data for your keywords, not a rule of thumb.
Can you take over an existing Google Ads account?
Yes, and we prefer it — historical data makes everything faster. We start with read-only access so we can review the account without changing anything, then request full access once you’ve decided to move forward. If your current agency owns the account rather than you, tell us early; recovering it can take a couple of weeks and occasionally it can’t be recovered at all, which is worth knowing before you give notice.
Do you guarantee results or a certain number of leads?
No, and you should be wary of anyone who does. Nobody controls the auction, your competitors’ budgets, or seasonality. What we do commit to is the work itself: weekly optimization, honest reporting, and a clear explanation of what changed and why. If we’re three months in and the numbers aren’t moving, we’ll say so directly rather than reframing the same data with a nicer chart.
Is Performance Max worth running?
Sometimes, and only after conversion tracking is genuinely clean. PMax optimizes toward whatever you tell it a conversion is, so feeding it noisy data produces expensive nonsense at scale. We also exclude brand terms so it can’t take credit for people who were already searching for you — a step a surprising number of accounts skip, which is exactly why PMax looks so good in their reporting.
What if my landing pages are the problem, not the ads?
Then we fix the landing pages, because we build websites too. This is the main reason clients come to us instead of a pure media-buying shop. When the audit shows the campaign is fine and the page is the bottleneck, we don’t hand you a recommendation and wish you luck — we scope the page work and ship it. See our web development services for how that side runs.
How often will we talk?
A scheduled call once a month, email or Slack whenever something needs a decision, and a same-day response during business hours. We won’t manufacture a weekly meeting to look busy. If there’s nothing meaningful to discuss, we’d rather spend that hour in your account.
Do you work with small businesses, or only larger budgets?
We work with plenty of small businesses. The honest constraint is arithmetic: below roughly $3,000 a month in ad spend, a management fee starts eating a share of the budget that’s hard to justify. If you’re under that, we’ll usually recommend a one-time build-and-train engagement — we set the account up properly, teach your team to run it, and you call us when you’re ready to scale.
Free, no strings
Find out what your account is actually costing you
Send us your Google Ads account or your website — whichever one is leaking more money — and we’ll come back with a short, specific list: what we’d change, in what order, and what we think it’s worth. No slide deck, no discovery call required to get it.
If we look at it and think you’re already in good hands, we’ll tell you that instead. We’d rather lose a pitch than take on work we can’t move the needle on.
- A written breakdown of wasted spend, with the search terms that caused it
- Your real cost per qualified lead — not per form fill
- Which landing pages are killing your conversion rate, and why
- Core Web Vitals and mobile speed scored against your top competitors
- A prioritized fix list you can hand to anyone — including your current agency
Turnaround is usually two to three business days. We’re at 320 W Ohio St in River North if you’d rather do it in person.