PPC Tips For Junk Removal Companies – Google & Bing Ads

People who search for a junk removal service typically get presented with a large number of companies to choose from, and it’s tough to differentiate. Most of these companies all offer similar junk removal options and fees. Whether you sign or lose a customer often comes down to marketing and advertising. It’s vital to be efficient when it comes to paid media, taking control of the factors you can control to maximize your leads when competing  against other junk cleanout and haul away companies.

One good thing about the junk removal PPC environment is that it doesn’t change and evolve that much. What people search for is very consistent. “Junk removal” the big winner of course, but there are a number of variations that include different types, times, and of course local modifiers. The simplicity of the keywords makes paying an agency to manage it every month a bit silly. At PPC Assist, we believe in effective setups with occasional guidance to keep ongoing costs low, allowing you to focus more of your budget on the actual ads.

The Pay Per Click management model offered by PPC Assist is a perfect fit for junk removal business owners.

junk removal paid media services

PPC Assist Scorecard

The overall score for the Junk Removal Industry is 8.5/10. The PPC Assist management model places controls on each factor that goes into the scorecard rating.

junk removal ppc scorecard
  • Fast Decision Process: The urgency behind the search for a junk removal service varies depending on the type of items the user is looking to get rid of. Situation is also a factor. For example, people with a broken appliance or unusable hot tub will often make a quicker decision than someone who just has an extra couch or basement full of unneeded stuff. Users searching for an estate or foreclosure clean out service are looking for help right now, where people with an old shed or used mattress might hem and haw on choosing a service or look to take care of the situation themselves.
  • Measurable conversions: Like many service-based companies, junk removal leads are mostly going to be phone calls and form submissions. PPC Assist can track both types of leads occurring on your website and then drill down to find the keywords that are driving referrals most efficiently. Calls coming directly from the ads themselves are also measurable.
  • Niche Negatives: There is a high availability of niche negatives in the junk removal industry. Here we will be excluding searches for regular weekly trash pickup, searches that indicate the user intends to dispose of item(s) on their own, select charity and donation queries, along with non-local and cleaning service queries.
  • Low Seasonality: There will be some seasonality in Northern states due to winter weather, however search volume overall for the junk removal industry remains fairly consistent throughout the year.
  • High CPCs: The junk removal industry is competitive and management fees should not be based on click costs. PPC Assist’s flat fee management model makes more sense.
  • Keyword Consistency: Junk removal and related keywords are very consistent here. Trends and innovation rarely impact keywords and overall search volume in this industry.

Industry Insights

The market for junk removal and junk hauling isn’t highly complex, but there are a few important considerations when targeting different types of items that people want removed.

Most of the volume comes from generic “junk removal” and “get rid of junk” searches, which can be a combination of people looking for a company to remove and haul away junk along with people who are researching how to handle a junk issue on their own.

Users adding a modifier to their search to specify a certain type of junk removal – typically furniture, appliance, foreclosure cleanout, or estate/property cleanout – 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.

Depending on the items for removal you want to target, we alter the strategy and ads to focus on the business areas where you want leads. We can even focus on targeting specific services to certain areas.

Which leads us to location as the other important industry consideration (we’ll cover this in-depth further below). Users sometimes search by pick-up location. We use negative lists of cities/counties/states that your company doesn’t serve (or that we are not targeting within the campaign).

Overall we want to make sure we target the types of junk removal you want lead for, along with the locations that you want to service. With effective conversion tracking in place and an occasional review of the search term report, campaigns can run effectively on the AI model without constant management. This makes the PPC Assist model an effective fit for junk removal and property cleanout companies.

Approximate CPCs (Cost per Clicks)

Google’s estimate for generic junk removal and junk hauling queries shows top of page bid estimates start at $4.30 to $4.50 and rise significantly for the absolute number 1 position. To drive leads aggressively, a company will want to target as many highly relevant keywords as possible within the targeted service area.

If your budget is very limited, you can bid lower and try to maximize the amount of traffic to your site from the ad campaign.

More specific junk removal searches such as furniture/appliance removal, foreclosure clean out, and estate/property clean out, typically offer lower click costs as long as you are not going for the number 1 ad position. The same goes for junk removal and hauling searches that are qualified with “service”, “company”, or “near me”. Be sure to include specific/niche keywords in your targeting, rather than just generic “junk removal” or “junk hauling”.

8 PPC Tips for Junk Removal Companies

We have some tips to help you minimize waste within your campaigns. Here are 8 tips to ensure high quality, highly relevant traffic is driven to your landing pages from your ad campaigns.

1. Location Targeting

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, Chicago, Dallas, or LA in the past. Don’t make the mistake of targeting people who have shown interest in your targeted locations.

The “Presence or interest” option sets a generous radius around your location. Furthermore, we’ve seen accounts use this setting and end up receiving a lot of international traffic along with ad clicks from other states or cities outside of the desired service area. As a local service provider this is something you really don’t want.

If you want to use the “Presence or interest” setting to expand your targeting, you can. Be sure to use negative location exclusions aggressively for these campaigns, which is something you should do anyway. For example, if your company is located in Atlanta, consider adding negatives for surrounding states, which would effectively just extend your reach to more rural Georgia to people who might be willing to travel to Atlanta.

This can get a little more nuanced for the junk removal industry. Sometimes people will qualify their search with a zip code or city for the pick-up location, 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, Nigeria, Pakistan, etc).

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

2. Conversion-Focused Landing Pages

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

Increasing conversion rates from 5% to 10% (or 20%) when the stakes are this high is invaluable.

Junk removal is a concept that is easy to understand, so you don’t need to spend a ton of time explaining the basics. The specific junk removal and junk hauling options you offer ARE very important though, so some communication is required to convince the user that you’ll be able to meet their needs. It’s important to feature relevant information quickly and near the top of the page. This will give the user confidence and enough information to fill out the form or give you a call.

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

Detailed content regarding your services and company may be of interest to more research-oriented users and is best placed below the fold.

3. Conversion Tracking

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

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

If your company allows for online scheduling for junk removal pickups (and/or a financial 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 from 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, along with Google Analytics, Meta, and any other data sources you may be using.

For most companies in the junk removal industry, tracking leads is enough. However, if you’re investing a lot into paid media ($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 assign a dollar value to leads. Once you have enough data, you can optimize for qualified leads rather than just contacts.

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.

4. Comprehensive Ad Extensions (Assets)

Ad Extensions allow for more creativity, but the main idea here is to take up as much real estate on the SERP as Google will allow. Not using these leads to smaller, less compelling ads with lower quality scores, lower CTRs and higher CPCs.

land clearing extensions

Location Assets – Your Google Business 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 Assets – Get users to call you immediately, but only schedule these to run when someone can answer the phone.

Callout Assets – These allow for some creativity and allow you to differentiate from competitors. Try to be specific with callouts at the campaign or ad group level. Talk specifically about what sets your junk removal company apart from others.

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

Structured Snippets – Junk removal companies will typically use these to display the different services that they provide using the “Service Catalog” snippet. You can list Furniture Removal, Appliance Removal, Foreclosure Cleanouts, Estate Cleanouts, etc. Include the services you prefer to provide to customers. You’ll need 3 extensions to run structured snippets.

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 Assets – Add these if you have some effective videos uploaded to YouTube. Who knows how Google will promote video assets in the future. As video continues to grow, utilizing this type of asset will be important in getting the attention of your target audience.

Promotion Assets – Offering a temporary discount for junk removal 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 ad 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 competition on the SERPs, the more likely you’ll get those clicks and conversions.

5. 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 search queries has become rampant. The only real way to combat this 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.

Still, we’ve seen unrelated or semi-related searches creep into phrase match campaigns that we really don’t want to be targeting. For example, “furniture donation pickup”. You need to think hard about these types of search terms and whether you should really be targeting them. For our campaigns, we recommend negating them to keep search terms as highly relevant as possible.

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. Keywords such as free, cheap, hiring, job, and PDF can typically be negated.

One factor to consider 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).

6. Search Partners

The vast majority of Search Partners are not search engines at all. The content and quality of these partner websites varies greatly. They are also more prone to fake, spam or bot traffic along with invalid clicks. Parked Domains are also part of the Search Partner network, although these can be excluded at the account-level.

For junk removal and other local service companies, we recommend disabling Search Partners unless your budget is large enough to support the additional volume from these Non-Google websites.

If you do decide to run on Search Partners, it is important to monitor how much of your ad spend is being allocated to these websites. You should also keep a close eye on the quality of your form fill leads.

7. Retargeting

Since junk removal services aren’t always based on an immediate and urgent issue, like being locked out of your house or a furnace that doesn’t work, retargeting can be an effective tactic. Retargeting results largely depend on the length of the decision making process for potential customers, so be sure to set the audience durations (length of time you continue to advertise to website visitors) accordingly.

We typically recommend retargeting for all junk removal companies with enough traffic to qualify (100 user minimum). Making a visual impact and continuing to reach users during the decision making process are reasons enough to test remarketing.

We don’t recommend keeping users on remarketing lists for a long period of time. This can affect your ability to get to minimum distribution requirements. 30- and 60-day durations are too long for this industry, and we tend to opt for 7-14 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.

8. Time Restrictions / Bid Adjustments

If you have a small budget, it’s best to restrict ad times to when you can answer the phone or respond to messages/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.

Keep in mind if many of your competitors are ignoring late night traffic, click costs can be much lower during that time. So instead of eliminating bidding, consider using bid adjustments to allow for inexpensive volume if it’s available (users can always leave a message or fill out a form).

Summary

The junk removal industry is competitive and can 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 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 junk removal companies to use a model like PPC Assist rather than active management.

Regardless of what ongoing costs your company pays for Google Ads account management, an effective setup is absolutely crucial in order to achieve success. 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 Junk Removal 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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