Google Ads for Transport: How To Setup An Effective Campaign

Google Ads is empowering transport businesses with tools that allow them to reach their audiences online.

A wide range of courier, delivery, logistics companies and many other transport businesses advertise on Google and its partner websites. And they are seeing how effective they can reach people and businesses that are searching for their services.

If you have a Google Ads account, you should login now to setup your ads. But if you don’t have one yet, then visit ads.google.com to create one.

Use the guidelines below to create a Google Ads campaign and promote your transport services and solutions.

 

Campaign objective

Google Ads helps transport companies set their objectives and goals directly in their campaigns. These objectives include Sales, Leads, Website traffic, Brand awareness and others.

Selecting one will help you achieve your goals. For most transport businesses the Leads objective is the most relevant because it focuses on getting you calls, online enquiries and similar conversions.

 

Campaign type

Next, you get to choose the campaign type that you want for your business. This decision determines all the other features and settings that you get and can mean the difference between a successful and unsuccessful campaign.

The Google Ads campaign most relevant for transport firms is the Search campaign. That’s because it directly targets people that are searching for your services on Google.

So, you’ll add keywords and ads and these will help to promote your business to your audiences.

 

Budget

A Google Ads budget for a transport business should be sufficient enough to reach your audiences during the times you want to run your ads. So, you should make sure that your budget doesn’t run out too early because your competitors will likely get more clicks and customers.

For courier companies and other transport businesses, a good starter budget is $50 or £40 per day. And then increase it as performance improves and as you get more leads, better click through rates (CTR) and Quality Scores.

 

Bidding

Next, you need to decide how you’ll bid on keywords to appear in the search results. You can use an automated bid strategy which will set the keyword bids automatically or use manual bidding to set bids for your Ad groups and keywords.

When you’re just starting it’s better to use an automated bid strategy. And a good one to start with for transport businesses is Maximise Clicks. That’s because it sets the bids for you and you can focus more on running your business and not updating bids every day.

 

Keywords

To find keywords that relate to the transport services that you provide, you can use a keyword research tool. There are many to choose from both free and paid and many of them are good enough to get you started and target your audiences effectively.

In your Google Ads account there is the Keyword Planner tool that you can use to carry out your research. It’s a free tool and you can find it in the Tools & Settings section in the top right corner.

Whatever keywords you find, you should group them according to themes and then create your ad groups. Making them tightly-themed means your ads will be a lot more targeted and you will achieve good click through rates and Quality Scores.

 

Text ads

A Google Ads campaign for a transport business should focus on creating quality text ads. The ads should include a good call to action that defines what you want your visitors to do.

It should also include the most relevant benefits and features, that are relevant for your target markets. So, avoid talking about yourself, like how long you have been in business and focus more on the exact needs of your customers.

For example, if you’re a delivery company, tell them how quick your service is and the different delivery options you have like same day and next day delivery.

 

Ad schedule

For transport and courier businesses, running ads when people can call quickly is important. So, it’s a good idea to run your ads during working hours and days on both weekdays and weekends. Many people searching online will be looking to call instantly or send an email and expect a quick response.

Ad schedule is a Google Ads feature that helps transport businesses set the days and hours when they would like their ads to appear.

The default setting is for your ads to run on all days and hours. But you can change that to whatever you want, based on performance results.

 

Where your ads appear

For your Search campaign, your ads will appear on Google for people who are searching for your services. This means your ads only appear when people are searching online using searches that are closely relate to the keywords in your campaign.

You should also consider advertising on Search partner sites to get more traffic and potentially more conversions. These sites use Google search tools to target people that are searching for your services.

And consider opting into the Display Network if you would like your ads to appear on these sites, when you have budget left over from your Search ads.

 

Case Study

MK London Link is an express courier service with a great history of serving customers with day, overnight and national deliveries. They had been running ads for some years for some very competitive keywords. It was a basic Smart campaign and I recommended setting up a Search campaign. The campaign I setup helped to reduce the CPC to £3 per click and CTR increased by 150%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

As a Google Ads PPC expert I’ve worked with many transport businesses, promoting their services with Search and Display campaigns. Get in touch below to discuss.