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Chicago, IL

Google Ads Management in Chicago, IL

Google is where Chicago demand already exists — a maintenance buyer typing a stamped part number, a homeowner searching a grill model in March. Our job is to be the cleanest listing in that moment.

Delivered remotely for brands across Chicago and Illinois.

Grow · Chicago

Why Chicago brands come to us for this

  • Feed titles rebuilt so part numbers and cross-references are searchable, not buried in a line-sheet SKU string
  • Brand separated from non-brand, so distributor and reseller bidding on your own name stops flattering the account
  • Weekly query mining tuned to strip spec-sheet, warranty and job-seeker traffic out of an industrial catalogue
  • Budget headroom held for Chicago weather spikes instead of a flat monthly cap that misses the ramp
  • Merchant Center shipping and returns annotations built around two-day ground reach from a Midwest warehouse

Google does not create the customer. It intercepts one who has already decided, which in this market means two very different searchers using the same box. A facilities buyer in Cicero types a part number off a failed component and wants a page that confirms compatibility. A household in Naperville types a category term in the second week of March because the snow finally stopped. Both are demand you capture rather than demand you manufacture, and the account has to be built to catch each without letting one pay for the other.

For a Chicago catalogue that starts in Merchant Center, not in the campaign builder. Deep manufacturing and housewares catalogues are exactly where feeds fall over: part numbers carried in the title as an internal SKU string, GTIN and MPN gaps on private-label lines, product types inherited from a line sheet rather than from how anyone shops, and quiet disapprovals on food, supplement and alcohol claims that nobody has opened the diagnostics tab to see. Fixing the feed changes which queries you are eligible for before a bid moves.

Then structure, and the structure question here is usually brand. A Chicago manufacturer with thirty years of trade equity is frequently bidding against its own distributors and against marketplace resellers of its own SKUs, so branded search looks magnificent and hides whether non-brand works at all. We separate them, give each its own budget and its own target derived from contribution margin after freight, and mine search terms weekly — because in an industrial catalogue the difference between a buying query and a spec-sheet-reading query is one word, and only the query report will tell you which one you bought.

Part numbers fedStamped OEM and model numbers written into the title, because that string is literally what the buyer types
Brand splitBranded and non-brand run as separate campaigns with separate targets
Central timeWeekly query mining and budget calls sit inside the Chicago working day
Local context

Part numbers, seasonality and a warehouse in the middle of the country

Three Chicago realities shape a Google account here. First, the highest-intent queries in this metro are alphanumeric: part numbers, cross-references, superseded SKUs and material grades, searched by maintenance and procurement buyers around the Elk Grove Village and Bedford Park industrial belt. Those queries are won in the feed and in Search with tight exact-match coverage, not by Performance Max guessing. Second, demand here has a hard calendar. Grill, patio, cooler and outdoor spend has to be building in February for a March ramp; snow removal, ice melt and cold-weather gear invert on the same axis and can spike inside forty-eight hours of a lake-effect forecast, which is an argument for budget headroom rather than a flat monthly cap. Third, the geography is an asset almost nobody uses: a warehouse in the Chicago area reaches a large share of the US population on two-day ground, so shipping speed and free-shipping annotations in Merchant Center are doing real competitive work against a coastal seller, and bidding should reflect that the profitable zones are not evenly spread.

Scope

What Google Ads includes

The same standard of work we run for every client — applied to a Chicago brand’s realities.

Full service detail
01

Merchant Center & Feed Rebuild

Disapprovals cleared at source, GTIN, MPN and attribute gaps closed, and titles rewritten to lead with searched terms. Custom labels for margin, stock cover and seasonality.

02

Brand, Non-Brand & Conquesting

Branded demand isolated into its own campaign, budget and target so non-brand performance becomes visible. Competitor conquesting runs as a separate line, judged separately.

03

Shopping & Performance Max Structure

Asset groups split by margin band and product type instead of one catch-all, with listing-group bids, product exclusions and brand-term controls applied wherever PMax still allows them.

04

Query Mining & Negative Hygiene

A weekly pass over search terms and PMax category reports, with a maintained shared negative library so budget stops leaking into research, DIY and job-seeker queries.

05

Promotions & Merchant Programs

Merchant promotions, sale price annotations, shipping and returns policy setup, product ratings, and local inventory ads where you have stores worth feeding.

06

tROAS Bidding to Contribution Margin

Targets set from margin per product group rather than a platform default, moved in controlled increments, with a written reason attached to every bid and budget change.

Scoped and quoted for your Chicago store

We do not work off a rate card. Every Chicago engagement starts with a fixed statement of work — named deliverables, named dates, one number — written after we have looked at your store, not before. If a smaller first step would serve you better, we will say so.

Get this scoped
How it runs

From kickoff to results

01

Feed & Account Audit

Merchant Center diagnostics, attribute coverage, campaign overlap and wasted spend scored against ninety days of search terms. You get the findings whether you hire us or not.

02

Fix the Feed

Titles, attributes, product types and custom labels rebuilt before any campaign work. A perfectly structured account on a bad feed still shows the wrong products to the wrong queries.

03

Restructure

Brand, non-brand, Shopping, PMax and Search rebuilt with hard budget boundaries and a shared negative library, so each line answers a different commercial question.

04

Bid to Margin

tROAS targets derived from contribution margin by product group and applied gradually, so the account keeps its learning instead of resetting it every Monday.

05

Mine & Expand

Weekly query mining, monthly feed reviews, then expansion into the categories the search data says you can profitably win. Nothing scales before the query set is clean.

Proof

Google Ads results

Anonymised under NDA. Figures pulled from the client’s own analytics.

Performance Apparel (DTC)

~$6M/yr DTC, 900+ SKUs across size and colour variants, US · Shopify Plus

Returns ran at 31% and refund cost consumed the entire paid media margin. One size chart image served 40 different fits, and 62% of add-to-carts started on a collection page that never showed variant availability. The named constraint: no new product photography budget, so every fix had to come out of the existing asset library and the review corpus.

+29%sitewide conversion rate1.71% to 2.21%, five-month average
+14%average order value$84 to $96 once the threshold bar and cross-sell shipped
31% → 22%return ratenine-point drop, roughly $310k/yr in recovered margin
1.9x → 2.4xblended MERwith paid spend held flat throughout
Engagement Conversion-led rebuild + paid mediaTimeframe 5 months

Consumer Electronics & Accessories

~$9M/yr, 210 SKUs, US + AU · Shopify Plus (migrated from BigCommerce)

Meta ROAS had slid from 3.6x to 1.9x in a year and the team had spent twelve months buying new creative to fix it. The real cause was measurement: the BigCommerce checkout dropped 22% of purchase events and the Conversions API had never been installed, so both ad platforms were optimising on incomplete data. The named constraint: peak season was 14 weeks out, and the replatform had to be live and stable well before Black Friday traffic arrived.

1.9x → 3.4xMeta ROAS, once the 22% event gap closed60 days after server-side tracking went live, spend up 18%. Most of that is signal we recovered, not performance we invented — the honest number is the blended CAC below, which is measured against Shopify orders
-32%customer acquisition cost$44 to $30 blended across Meta and Google
4.1s → 1.7smobile LCPdesktop went 2.9s to 1.2s over the same window
+47%peak-season revenueBlack Friday through Cyber Monday, year over year
Engagement Paid growth audit → migration → paid media retainerTimeframe 6 months
In their words

Clients on this work

Non-brand search revenue ~2x at flat spend

“Six thousand products and a Shopping feed nobody had touched since it was first generated — a third of it was disapproved and we had no idea. They rebuilt the feed off our real product data, fixed the GTIN and size attributes, and split brand off from non-brand so I could finally see what we were actually paying to acquire. They also cut the broad 'baby clothes' terms that were eating a quarter of the budget on people who were nowhere near buying. Spend is roughly flat and non-brand search revenue has close to doubled.”

Director of OperationsKids & baby brand, ~$5M/yr · Atlanta, GA
Verified via Shopify Partner referral
FAQ

Google Ads in Chicago — your questions

It is one of the most common findings on a Chicago manufacturer's account. You cannot stop authorised resellers by wishing, so the practical route is trademark enforcement on ad copy where the terms are yours, a defended branded campaign priced sensibly rather than fought at any cost, and a landing experience that beats a marketplace listing on the thing a buyer is actually checking — compatibility, spec detail and stock. We also make the case commercially, because a reseller outbidding you on your own SKU is spending your channel margin to sell your product.

Partly, and less well than the pitch suggests. PMax will serve a clean feed against category demand, but alphanumeric part-number queries are precise, low-volume and high-margin, and they deserve explicit Search coverage with the exact terms rather than being left to broad matching. We usually run both: PMax and Shopping carrying the catalogue, a tight Search layer owning the part-number and cross-reference queries that a Chicago distributor makes its living on.

Faster than a monthly plan allows. Snow removal, ice melt, heated gear and winter categories can move within two days of a forecast, and outdoor categories ramp on the first genuinely warm weekend rather than on a date. We hold agreed headroom above the baseline with pre-approved triggers, so the budget can move on a Tuesday morning without anyone having to convene a meeting about it.

Yes, and often the most valuable outcome is not the direct order. Chicago manufacturers regularly find that non-brand Search and Shopping generate qualified demand they can hand to a distributor, plus first-party data and query intelligence about what the market is actually looking for. We set that up deliberately with MAP-safe pricing display and dealer-locator paths where a direct sale would cause more trouble than it is worth.

Yes, once the feed and the exclusions are right. PMax on a clean feed with margin-segmented asset groups and brand controls is the strongest Shopping vehicle Google has shipped. PMax on a neglected feed is an expensive way to sell bestsellers to people who were buying anyway.

Because Shopping never sees your keywords, only your feed. Title, product type, GTIN and attributes decide which queries you are even eligible for. We routinely find a quarter of a catalogue disapproved or serving on the wrong terms, and fixing that moves revenue before a single bid changes.

Usually yes, but as a separate campaign with its own target and its own conversation. Branded clicks are cheap and convert well, which is exactly why blending them into non-brand hides whether the rest of the account works. Where the spend is material we run a holdout to see what is genuinely incremental.
Next step

Google Ads for your Chicago brand.

Thirty minutes with the strategist who would actually run your account. We screen-share your store, read your data live, and tell you the three highest-value things we can see from the outside.

Shopify or Shopify Plus stores doing $150k/mo or moreFounder, CEO or eCommerce lead on the callNo deck and no pitch — we open your store instead

Prefer to write it out? [email protected] gets a real reply the same business day, Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm MT.