CLIENT

Illinois CPA Society (ICPAS)

As the busiest time of many CPAs’ year, the Illinois CPA Society (ICPAS) wanted to drive traffic and usage of their Find a CPA tool to help promote members’ businesses at tax time. To do so, they needed a partner to help them reach Illinois residents across the state.

In a similar campaign in 2025, we determined the best-performing platform was Google, generating more impressions and clicks at a more cost effective rate than other digital platforms like Meta and LinkedIn. Messaging-wise, the 2025 campaign focused in on tax credits that emerged or were updated that tax year (lifetime learning, home office).

Going into 2026, we worked with the ICPAS team to develop new messaging that we could test on Google display and search: general “it’s tax time” messaging targeting the masses, and a “life happens” campaign targeting people specifically going through a life change that could impact their tax return (e.g., graduating college, starting a new job, getting married, having a baby, retiring).

After two weeks testing both messages, we had a clear winner: the “life happens” campaign outperformed general messaging by a large margin for both display and search. This was our signal to end the general campaign and move all remaining budget into the one based on life stages.

The result? In just under six weeks, our ads generated 2.83M impressions and drove over 35k clicks to the ICPAS Find a CPA tool—41% more clicks than the 2025 campaign.