Philadelphia is the most expensive click in Pennsylvania and the most forgiving one, because the person searching is usually a few blocks from you. We run Google Ads, Local Services Ads and social campaigns for Philadelphia businesses from the agency that started in Old City in 2015: bids set by neighborhood and by hour, the account checked every working day, and every dollar followed from the search to the phone call it produced.
Serving Philadelphia, PA and the rest of Pennsylvania from the Philadelphia area.
The same four jobs on every account we run in the city, whatever the category.
Center City, the Northeast, South Philly, the Main Line edge and the river wards each get their own bid adjustments, so the budget follows the customers rather than the skyline.
A plumber is searched at seven in the morning and a bar at ten at night. Ad schedules are built from your own call data, not a default, and tightened every month.
For the trades, legal and home services, the Google Screened spot at the top of the page, priced per lead and disputed when the lead was never a customer.
Every call and form is recorded against the search that produced it. The report shows which Philadelphia terms brought customers and which only brought clicks.
Most Philadelphia accounts we take over are paying for the wrong searches. The first month is spent removing them.
We started in Old City in 2015 and run the paid work from the Jenkintown and Montgomeryville offices now. The people setting your bids have run campaigns for Philadelphia firms, restaurants, practices and contractors for a decade and know what a click in each part of the city should cost.
You get a named account manager you can call, a monthly report written in plain language, and an ad account that stays in your name.
A roofer in the Northeast, a lawyer in Center City and a restaurant in East Passyunk are bidding in the same auction with different customers, different hours and different prices. Campaigns built for the whole city pay Center City rates for Roxborough clicks. Ours are built for the neighborhoods your customers actually live in.
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What Philadelphia owners ask before they hand over a budget.
Two numbers. The ad budget, which you set and pay to Google directly, and the management fee, which is priced on the size of the account rather than a percentage of spend. Philadelphia clicks in legal, home services and medical run higher than the rest of the state, which is why the neighborhood bidding matters. The free audit comes with a budget estimate for your category and your part of the city.
Yes, by not bidding where they bid. National brands and the large firms buy the broad, expensive terms. A neighborhood business wins on the specific searches they ignore: the service plus the neighborhood, the emergency phrasing, the questions people type at night. Those clicks cost less and convert better.
Yes, for every category Google allows into the program, which covers most trades, home services, legal and several professional categories. We handle the licensing and background checks, write the profile, set the per-lead budget and dispute the leads that were never a customer. For most Philadelphia home services companies the Local Services Ads and the Google Ads campaign run together.
The ones your customers come from, which is not always the ones nearest you. We start with your own customer list and call history, map it by zip code, and build the targeting from that. A Center City firm often finds its best clients in Chestnut Hill and the Main Line; a Northeast contractor rarely wants a click from South Philadelphia.
You do. Campaigns are built in an account in your name, we work in it as a manager, and the history, conversion data and audiences stay with you if you ever leave. If you already have an account, we audit it and build inside it rather than starting over.
Search campaigns produce calls as soon as the ads are approved, usually within the first week. The first month is spent cutting the searches that do not convert and moving the budget toward the ones that do, so the cost per call falls through the first quarter. We report the calls, not the clicks, so you can see the number move.
The people who would run your Philadelphia campaign, in their own words — how the bids get set neighborhood by neighborhood, and where the waste goes.
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Philadelphia has more competition per search than any market we work in, and the auction reflects it. A click on “personal injury lawyer Philadelphia” costs what a small business pays for a week of clicks elsewhere; a click on “HVAC repair Northeast Philadelphia” is a fraction of that and far more likely to become a customer. PPC management in Philadelphia is mostly the work of finding the second kind of search and spending there.
Every account starts with the search terms report rather than the keyword planner. We look at what Philadelphia customers typed before they called you, or your competitors, and build the campaigns around those phrases, with the neighborhoods, the landmarks and the local spellings people actually use. Negative keyword lists are worked every day so the budget stops paying for job seekers, students and people in other cities.
Google Ads search campaigns carry most of the budget because the intent is highest. Local Services Ads sit above them for the trades, legal and home services, priced per lead with the Google Screened badge. Meta and Instagram campaigns carry the remarketing and the audiences search cannot reach: the visitor who looked at your menu and did not book, the homeowner in Chestnut Hill who has not started searching for a roofer yet.
The Philadelphia ad account that works is the one that stops treating the city as a circle. Center City and University City searches skew to professional services, lunch and evening hours, and higher prices per click. The Northeast, from Mayfair to Somerton, is the home services market: roofing, HVAC, plumbing, searched early in the morning and on weekends. South Philadelphia and the river wards are restaurants, bars, gyms and studios, searched at night. Chestnut Hill, Mount Airy and Roxborough behave more like the Main Line than like the rest of the city.
We build the location targeting by zip code and set bid adjustments for each, then let the schedule follow your own call data. A campaign for a Center City firm turns down in the Northeast at dawn, and a campaign for a Mayfair contractor does not pay Rittenhouse rates at lunchtime. The same logic applies across the bridge: a customer in Cherry Hill will drive into the city for a specialist and not for a plumber, so some campaigns cross the river and some stop at the Delaware. The Cherry Hill pay per click work runs from the same desk when a business wants both sides.
A Philadelphia click is too expensive to send to a homepage. Each ad group lands on a page about that service and that part of the city, built fast enough for a phone on the El, with a tap-to-call number in reach at every scroll. Where the page does not exist yet, we build it as part of the campaign.
Paid search is the fastest way to find out which Philadelphia terms turn into customers, and that knowledge should not stay in the ad account. The keywords that convert on Google Ads become the pages the Philadelphia SEO program builds, so the organic rankings grow on terms already proved to pay, and the ad budget can come down on the terms where the map pack and the organic listing take over.
The reverse is true as well. The organic data tells us which searches already bring you customers for free, so the paid campaign stops bidding on your own brand and your own strongest terms and spends where the rankings are not yet there. A business that runs both from the same agency gets one report with both numbers on it and one person to call about either.
Campaigns are built in an ad account the business owns. We work in it as a manager, the management fee is priced on the size of the account rather than a share of the spend, and if you ever leave, the history, the conversion data and the audiences stay with you. The monthly report says what was spent, what it bought and which Philadelphia searches produced the calls, in plain language, with the recordings available if you want to hear them.
Paid data should feed the organic program, so Philadelphia SEO and Local SEO run on what the Paid Advertising campaigns have already proved converts, and the Montgomery County and Bucks County campaigns run from the same desk for a business that serves the suburbs too.
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