Google Ads / PPC Strategy Proposal - Moving Company

Imagine you were operating a moving company based in Los Angeles, but someone in New York City wanted to relocate to Dallas.  You’re going to waste a lot of money on gas while your empty trucks drive across the country to pack up the home.  Then, when the job is finished, you’ll waste even more money driving back to Los Angeles – but your next customer might call from New York, forcing you to once again move your trucks back cross the country. 

Luckily, if you’re in the business of coordinating interstate moves, you’re going to benefit from network effects as you add trucks to your fleet – but the same problem exists on a smaller scale each time you coordinate a full-service move from a destination in one city, and upon completion, the next available customer is hundreds of miles away.

You analyze the profitability of moves in and out of 10 cities using a dataset of full-service moves across state lines.  Your analysis leads you to the conclusion that these 10 cities are your most profitable cities to do business.   You decide to capitalize on your company’s ability to coordinate the arrival of moving trucks in those cities with other moves scheduled days later because it saves your company thousands of dollars by reducing gasoline costs, reducing wages paid to idle moving teams, and avoiding unnecessary capital depreciation each time you relocate an unencumbered truck in your fleet.  

How might you generate more qualified leads to these cities and from those cities to take advantage of the situation?  The natural place to start would be to create a campaign through Google Ads to capture qualified leads that match this description.  After you get a campaign running, you can test the results, and after optimizing your campaign settings, you can automate your promotional offers based on the customers who are most likely to generate profit for the firm.  We’ll do this by starting broad and achieving proof of concept before investing time and resources into implementing a more sophisticated strategy that relies on data from the business’ CRM software to geographically segment customers into ad groups based on other orders.  

For our initial campaign, we’re going to focus on search ads because these customers are reliably high intent.  Later, we’ll implement a system to target customers by their city of origin with separate ad groups within each campaign.

At this stage, our primary focus is collecting more data on customers that originate in the 10 cities we identified as most profitable for long distance moves.

The city of origin would be set here, in the location setting.

It’s worth mentioning that we would most likely target a broader area than just the city proper, but this will depend on detailed information about how proximity impacts the potential cost savings of this campaign.

With that in mind, we’ll enter multiple headlines and descriptions in a responsive search ad so Google Ads can automatically learn which combinations perform best across all of the traffic provided by broad match.  Google Ads Manager will automatically recommend some keywords based on the information you provide, but for a more complete understanding of how competitors are approaching their keyword strategy, it’s worth spending time on SEMRush to get a more complete picture.   We’ll study relevant competitor ads and optimize our ads accordingly.

This moving company has clearly identified a campaign strategy that works for them, so we’ll use some some of their headlines in our own ads.  These are some generic examples of ads that are likely to perform well.

The problem is that these ads don’t effectively target the specific customer we’re trying to reach.  We want to appeal to customers based on what they are looking for.   That is why we are creating distinct ad groups within this campaign – each ad group represents a different customer based on their goal: a move to a specific city.

Here, we focused on search terms related to destination.  It’s important to spend time analyzing Google Search trends prior to choosing your keywords, but we’re skipping that process for now.  Just remember that this campaign is reach new customers moving to the Dallas area, and choose accordingly.  

For the first ad group, we’re going to choose headlines that focus on our customer’s goal of moving to Dallas, and pin those specific headlines to the first position.  For the other two headlines, we’ll borrow effective headlines from our generic search ad example. 

The next important aspect of our campaign is the promotional offer.  Due to the centralized structure of our moving business, we hypothesized that coordinating full-service moves between states could be highly profitable due to synergies that competitors, mostly running decentralized offices run by individual franchise owners, can’t benefit from.  To make sure that we capture these high value leads, we might want to offer customers a discount to attract them to our service and close the deal.  Further analysis would help us come to conclusions about how to offer these discounts, but let’s say that you decide to offer $200 discounts of moves to specific locations, or 20% off full-service moves.

After you implement similar settings for each of the 10 ad groups, each representing a different city, you can start to collect data and optimize the performance of the campaign.  During this phase, we just need to first confirm that our strategy is viable by collecting more data.  We are not going to focus on automatically targeting specific cities of origin based on destination data from our CRM yet because it’s possible, if not likely, that ad group segmentation would prove less effective than Google’s automated solutions.  This is an example from Google’s guide to search automation: