PPC Tips for Dumpster Rental Companies – Google & Bing Ads

Users searching for dumpster rentals are making decisions quickly based on a limited amount of information. There’s little differentiation between products, and the offerings are all pretty straightforward. This makes the paid search marketing landscape a textbook study on the importance of efficiency and focusing on the factors you can control to maximize your leads.

It also means that there’s a limited number of things a paid search manager can do to improve your results. I’ll walk through what those things are, their limitations, and why on-demand management thus makes sense for a lot of home services companies looking to expand their dumpster rental business.

All these things make the dumpster rental industry an excellent match for our PPC management model here at PPC Assist.

dumpster rental marketing

PPC Assist Scorecard

The overall score for Dumpster Rental Companies comes in at an 8.2/10, making it a great fit for PPC Assist’s management model.

  • Fast Decision Process: While you could argue the need for a dumpster isn’t quite as pertinent as a locksmith or DWI Attorney, it’s still a pretty fast decision making process. There isn’t a ton of differentiation between options, so users in the market for a dumpster are usually able to make a decision very quickly.
  • Measurable conversions: Like many home services companies, leads are generally going to be phone calls and form submissions. Pricing on dumpsters can be a little tricky, but if your company offers online ordering and checkout, those are also excellent (and measurable) conversions that should be included in conversion measurement.
  • Niche Negatives: Dumpster rentals rank lowest on the availability of niche negatives just because the industry is quite straightforward and there are fewer pitfalls. Very few people are looking to buy a dumpster and product variation is low, so we’re really just excluding non-local and informational searches. The reason for the low rating here, then, is just because less inefficiency exists for us to curtail.
  • Low Seasonality: The score would be higher in temperate climates with less seasonality, but overall this will lose a few points because dumpster rentals decrease in the winter. Adjusting budgets is necessary if you’re not operating on a target cost per lead model.
  • High CPCs: This is a competitive industry, and CPCs are high. That makes paying an agency or freelancer a percentage of the cost of these clicks rather silly, in our opinion. It’s higher stakes so efficiency is important, but you shouldn’t be paying more in management fees just because keyword costs are higher.
  • Keyword Consistency: Keywords are extremely consistent here – this industry isn’t influenced by trends and doesn’t experience frequent innovation risks.

Industry Insights

The market for dumpsters isn’t highly complex, but there are a few important considerations when targeting different types of rentals.

Most of the volume is in generic “dumpster rentals”, which can be a mix of actual search intents but leans heavily towards residential dumpster rentals.

Users adding a modifier to their search to specify a certain type of dumpster – typically either roll-offs, commercial, construction, or residential – can mean more relevant leads for your company. We structure accounts in a way that allow you to put more emphasis on one area or another.

Roll-Off Dumpsters: These are large, open-top dumpsters that are typically delivered to a location using a special roll-off truck. They are commonly used for construction and renovation projects, home cleanouts, and large-scale waste disposal.

Residential Dumpsters: Smaller-sized dumpsters designed for residential use, usually for smaller home projects, cleanouts, or yard waste disposal.

Construction Dumpsters: These are heavy-duty dumpsters designed to handle construction debris, such as concrete, wood, drywall, and other materials generated during construction and demolition projects.

Commercial Dumpsters: Larger dumpsters suited for businesses and commercial properties, typically for routine waste disposal. They come in various sizes to accommodate different volumes of waste.

Depending on the type of dumpsters you want to target, we alter the strategy and ads to focus on the business areas you want leads. We can even focus on targeting specific services to certain areas.

Which leads us to location being the other important industry consideration here (which we’ll cover more in “Location Targeting” below). Users are typically searching by drop-off location, so this can get a little bit tricky. We use negative lists of zip codes and towns/cities/neighborhoods that users may use to search that your company doesn’t serve (or isn’t a great fit for you).

The main idea here is to make sure we’re targeting the variations you want to target and in the area you want to deliver and pick up. From there, with effective conversion tracking in place, campaigns can run effectively on the AI model without active management, making the PPC Assist model an effective fit for dumpster rental and home renovation companies.

Approximate CPCs (Cost per Clicks)

Google’s estimate for generic dumpster rental queries shows $2.05 on the low end up to $8.50 on the high end for top of page bid estimates (showing up in the top 3-4). For companies who want to aggressively drive leads, showing up in the top 2 spots is important, especially on mobile devices. In our experience, we see the high end of that range to be a more realistic price point. Roll-off dumpster searches operate a similar price levels.

That said, you can differentiate with ad copy, underbid the market, and accept lower volumes showing up in lower positions.

Searches for “commercial dumpsters” and “construction dumpsters” have MUCH lower volume (we’re talking 1-2% of the size of regular dumpster searches), but do have slightly higher estimated ranges of $2.20-$11.

10 PPC Tips for Dumpster Rental Companies

If you’re running campaigns in this industry, we have a few tips to make sure you aren’t wasting money on your campaigns. Here are 10 tips to help you maximize the use of your budget:

1. Location Targeting

Don’t make this mistake! Google and Bing seem to have a very loose idea of “interested in” when it comes to geographic locations. We’ve seen clients in major metropolitan areas get a significant amount of international traffic for local services just because people have searched for places like NYC, Boston, or LA in the past. That’s something that needs to be fixed immediately!

The “Presence or interest”, at a minimum, sets a very generous radius around your location. However, as mentioned, we’ve seen accounts with a lot of international traffic that use this setting, which as a local service provider you really don’t want.

If you want to use the “Presence or interest” setting to be more liberal with your targeting, you can. In these cases, we recommend using negative location exclusions aggressively for these campaigns (which you should be doing anyways). For example, if your company is located in Chicago, consider adding negatives for surrounding states, which would effectively just extend your reach to more rural Illinois to people who might be willing to travel to Chicago.

This can get a little more nuanced for the dumpster rental industry. Sometimes people will search with zip codes or exact drop-off locations, so you should be prepared with negative keywords to fight any irrelevant traffic.

By default, we exclude a number of countries from all campaigns that have high populations and frequently show an interest in the US (e.g. India).

As part of the negative keyword lists, we also recommending excluding people searching for services “in” an undesirable country/state/city/neighborhood, or even zip code.

2. Mobile Optimization

The majority of your traffic is going to be from mobile devices. That trend has been evolving for years, but especially for home services companies, having an effective mobile experience is paramount to success.

We recommend using a mobile-first design (focusing on mobile users first), or at least analyzing how your website appears on mobile devices and making adjustments to improve usability. It should be very easy for users to scroll through the mobile website, quickly understand all the content, and fill out conversion forms quickly.

3. Conversion-Focused Landing Pages

Maximizing conversion rates are integral to being successful in paid search. We see a lot of companies driving expensive traffic to outdated websites that aren’t optimized for mobile devices or don’t have simple, effective call to actions.

Increasing conversion rates from 6% vs 10% (or 25%) when the stakes are this high is invaluable.

Dumpster renting is a concept that is easy to understand, so you don’t need to spend a ton of time explaining the basics. Different rental options, sizing, and rental terms ARE very important though, so some communication is required to convince the user that you’ll be able to satisfy their needs. So, it’s important to feature relevant information quickly and accessibly to give the user enough information to fill out the form or calling without overcomplicating things.

Make sure your forms are short and easy to fill out, and that there is a clear phone number on the website (especially for mobile).

Detailed content that may be of interest to more research-oriented users is best pushed below the fold.

4. Conversion Tracking

At PPC Assist, our management philosophy relies heavily on effective conversion tracking to operate successfully. Utilizing “big data” AI-driven ideas relies on the algorithm being able to differentiate between a good click and a bad one.

Tracking contacts is vital, which for dumpster rental companies typically means click-to-calls, calls from ads, contact form fills, and landing page form fills. During onboarding, we’ll make sure all of these are set up and tracked via Google Tag Manager.

If your company allows for online reservation and checkout, that’s an even higher quality data point that we’d want included in optimization and decision making. We can even assign values for different order sizes to try to focus on more valuable leads.

If you’re using a third party to facilitate any of this – from appointment scheduling to e-commerce to reservation scheduling, that can sometimes present a challenge form a tracking perspective. You’d need to evaluate the conversion tracking options of each 3rd party tool you’re employing and figure out the best way to get that data into Google or Bing Ads, as well as Google Analytics, Meta, and any other data sources you may be using.

For most companies in this industry, tracking leads is enough. However, if you’re investing a lot into paid media (say, $5k+/month), you could take it a step further and feed lead quality data back into your acquisition sources. You could use lead scoring, differentiating between Leads vs. MQLs vs. SQLs, or even assigning a dollar value to leads. Once you have enough data, you can optimize for qualified leads rather than just contacts (similar logic to the e-commerce discussion above).

Optimizing for qualified leads rather than simple contacts or form fills helps campaigns optimize for the right users, which gives you an advantage over advertisers who are optimizing for any contact. But it’s quite a bit more work, so most companies in the industry avoid this level of complexity.

5. Comprehensive Ad Extensions

Ad Extensions allow for a little creativity (mainly with Callouts), but the main theory here is to take up as much real estate on the SERP as Google will allow. Forgetting to use these just ends up with smaller, less compelling ads with lower quality scores, decreasing CTRs and increasing CPCs. Not good.

land clearing extensions

Location Extensions – Your GMB listing is important, and it should be integrated into your account as an extension. Map listings can be powerful, so make sure this is optimized and added to your account.

Call Extensions – Skip the website if you can! Get users to call you immediately, but only schedule these to run when someone can answer the phone.

Callout Extensions – These allow for some creativity and allow you to differentiate from competitors a bit. If you can be specific with callouts on the campaign or ad group level, do it. In other words, talk specifically about what sets your dumpster rental company apart from others

Sitelink Extensions – The more content you have on your website, the more options you’ll have here. This allows you to be specific with Sitelink Extensions, using not just service pages and contact pages, but also relevant resources, subservices, or even testimonial pages.

Structured Snippets – Home services companies will typically use these to display the different services that they provide using the “Service Catalog” snippet. Here, you can just list Roll Off Dumpsters, Residential Dumpsters, Commercial Dumpsters, Dumpster Delivery, etc – any variation of the services your company offers. You could even use different sizes. Just use as many of them as you can, and make them as relevant as possible. You need 3 extensions to run these, but if you only have 3 services, that’s perfectly fine.

Image Extensions – Pictures draw attention to the ad and should be used in all cases. Keep in mind these appear quite small on search pages, so nothing too complicated. Just make your dumpster look clean and high-quality.

Video Extensions – While these don’t get much attention for search campaigns, it doesn’t hurt to add them if you have some effective videos uploaded to YouTube. Who knows how Google will promote these in the future. As video continues to grow, utilizing your video assets will be important in getting the attention of your target audience.

Price Extensions – Do you have prices that you can list for different sizes and terms? Add them here! If you have different pricing for different locations, these are more difficult to use, so make sure you specify on your landing page more detailed pricing if you provide these extensions and they aren’t always 100% accurate.

Promotion Extensions – Offering a temporary discount for dumpster rental services? Using a promotion extension will highlight it on the search page and bring a little extra attention to your ad. This requires a more active approach to management, though.

For all extensions, it’s important to be as targeted as possible with them. That often means ad group or campaign level extensions (depending on your structure) rather than account-level extensions. The more you can speak directly to the needs of the user and differentiate yourself from the general contractor ads on the SERPs, the more likely you’ll get those clicks and conversions.

6. Extensive Negative Keyword Lists

The importance of extensive negative keyword lists has moved way up the list of importance over the past few years. As Google and Bing have gotten more and more liberal with their keyword matching definitions, unintended targeting of certain keywords has become rampant. The only real way to combat that at the moment is with extensive negative keyword lists.

At PPC Assist, our negative keyword lists are immediately applied to current campaigns. This often results in immediate savings that more than cover our costs. As mentioned earlier, however, the dumpster rental industry is less prone to this than many others.

Still, we’ve seen unrelated or semi-related searches creep into broad match campaigns that we really don’t want to be targeting, such as brush removal or junk removal. You need to think hard about these ancillary keywords and whether you should really be targeting them. For our campaigns, we recommend removing them and have comprehensive lists of similar services that we avoid spending on.

Location negatives are very important here, excluding zips/states/cities/countries you don’t deliver to.

Other negatives that we recommend applying include specific words that would disqualify someone, cheap/free (high are popular for dumpster rentals), pdfs and other documents, legal keywords, and the list goes on.

A slightly contentious strategy is whether or not to target competitor brand names. Some companies and PPC managers love to do it, others consider it a big no-no. By default, we don’t exclude competitor brand names, but we do recommend breaking them into a separate campaign to analyze their effectiveness (if you want to run them).

7. Don’t Stress About Match Types

Don’t stress about match types because they don’t matter that much anymore. Exact doesn’t mean exact, phrase doesn’t mean phrase, so agonizing over match type structures is just a guessing game of what keywords you’ll actually qualify for. Rather than worry about that, embrace the AI-focused bidding and give Google and Bing the opportunity to drive cost-effective results for you.

Broad match is feasible as long as negative keyword lists are comprehensive. With extensive and useful negative keyword lists, you can loosen your grip on match types and allow for more targeting freedom, knowing that you’re restricting the AI from spreading too much given your extensive exclusions.

For new accounts, we often recommend starting with exact and phrase keywords, but for dumpster rental companies this isn’t really necessary. Since we have comprehensive lists of negatives and the keyword variety isn’t very diverse in the industry, broad targeting can safely expand your reach without introducing lots of poor quality.

8. Retargeting

Since dumpster rental services aren’t based on an immediate and urgent issue, like being locked out of your house or a broken heater, retargeting can be an effective tactic. Effectiveness of retargeting advertising largely depends on the length of the decision making process for potential clients, so make sure to set your audience lengths (advertise to users visiting the website in the past X days) accordingly.

We typically recommend retargeting for all dumpster rental companies with enough traffic to qualify for lists (100 user minimum). Making a visual impact and continuing to influence users during the decision making process are a great reason for remarketing.

While we do recommend it, we don’t recommend keeping users on lists for an extended period of time, which can affect your ability to get to minimum distribution requirements. 30- and 60-day cookies are probably too long for this industry, and we tend to opt for up to 10-14 day targeting. That said, you need to set it large enough for eligibility.

Retargeting can also be done through several mediums. Rather than just retarget on the platform you’re advertising on, you can expand reach to social media platforms (Facebook and Instagram in particular), or other Display and Video ad networks (Bing, YouTube, Google).

9. Time Restrictions / Bid Adjustments

If you’re operating on a limited budget, it’s best to restrict ad times to when you can answer the phone or respond to chats. The larger your phone number CTA on the website, the more this is true. If most of your leads are coming through your form, there’s less urgency to do this.

Of course, if a lot of advertisers are ignoring late night traffic, sometimes it can be had very cheap. So instead of eliminating bidding, consider using bid adjustments to allow for inexpensive volume if it’s available (they can always leave a message or fill out a form).

10. Test Bidding Strategies

Quite frankly, the “maximize conversions/clicks” bidding models that Google recommends these days get pretty scary when multiple companies are all vying for the same leads. The more competitive your geographic area, the more prone prices are to spiking. There isn’t much keeping CPCs from spiraling upward. For that reason, it can be a good idea to maintain a bit more control on bidding and test alternative (capped) bidding strategies.

Even the “maximize” bidding models allow for targeting CPAs or restricting clicks from going over a certain amount. If click costs are getting out of control, setting a limit here to see if clicks can continue without restricting performance may be a worthwhile test.

You could also consider going a bit more old-school with Manual CPC for a bit to test the elasticity of the bidding market. If there are only 1-3 aggressive bidders in the market, taking bids down could have a significant, positive impact on CPCs and results. If it’s a competitive market, however, it’s likely others will just fill in the space and you’ll lose all your exposure.

Summary

The home services industry is competitive, so dumpster rental companies will likely face steep local competition and relatively high CPCs. As PPC evolves, it’s important to evolve with it. At PPC Assist, that’s exactly what we’re helping home service companies do.

Many agencies charge a high percentage of spend for PPC management, which just doesn’t make a lot of sense when CPCs are high and budgets are low. Even worse are companies charging $500+ management fees on monthly budgets of less than $1k. We’ve seen it many times! With the increased effectiveness of AI-optimized tools and bidding, it makes more and more sense for dumpster rental companies to use a model like this rather than active management.

Regardless of what ongoing costs your company pays for management of your Google Ads account, an effective setup is absolutely crucial in all cases for the success of the effort. The tips above focus on putting you in a good place, structuring the account well and reducing wasteful spend as your account runs. There are certainly benefits for ongoing help (including seasonality adjustments), but for companies in this industry our on-demand model makes a lot more sense than a high retainer fee.

If you’re interested in learning more about PPC Assist, check out our PPC for Dumpster Rentals or PPC for Home Services pages, or view our pricing to see how much you can save on management. You can also request a free review of your account!

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