PPC for Transport Business: 7 Tips for Exceptional Campaign Management

PPC advertising for your transport business is a highly effective way to reach your audiences as they search online. If you’re already running a campaign, then you’re likely seeing the benefits of advertising in Google Ads or other similar platform.

Whether you’re a logistics, delivery, courier or any other transport business that is running PPC campaigns, you need to manage them effectively.

There are a few guidelines you can follow each month to ensure they are performing at the best level. So, I’ve included below the most important management tactics to help you do it effectively.

 

1. Setup conversion tracking

Set up conversion tracking to track enquiries and leads that you get from your PPC ads. As a transport business this will help you to see how your PPC campaigns are performing and identify areas for improvement.

To get started with conversion tracking, visit the Conversions page in Tools & Settings in your Google Ads account. In there you can set up tracking to track all form submissions on your website and also track calls from your ads and website too.

Also, you can set up goal tracking in Google Analytics to track all form submissions on your website and import these goals into Google Ads. Visit the admin page in your Analytics account and go to the Goals link and use one of the templates there to set up goal tracking.

 

2. Add new negative keywords

One of the important actions of your campaign management is to add negative keywords to block searches that are not relevant. This helps your targeting and ensures that you only get relevant people seeing your ads and that ensures you get a high conversion rate.

The best place to find negative keywords is in your Search terms report. You’ll find this report under the Keywords tab in your campaign. And next to each search term is an option to select it and add as a keyword or negative keyword.

So, you’ll select all the irrelevant ones and add them as negative keywords at the campaign or ad group levels. Or you can add them in a negative keyword list at the account level.

 

3. Check Recommendations

The Recommendations page is a helpful page that shows you a number of options to improve your campaigns. It lists in descending order of importance recommendations that you can apply or dismiss according to your requirements.

These recommendations are for every part of your account and campaigns and include responsive ads, keywords, dynamic search ads, bid strategies and more.

They are created by the machine learning system when it finds opportunities to improve your campaigns and ads. However, not all will be relevant. So, you’ll need to review each of them and then apply the relevant ones and dismiss the ones that are not.

As you do so, you’ll see your account’s Optimisation score improve and get closer to 100%. Also, updating them this way ensures that the system will send better recommendations in the future.

 

4. Update bid strategy

One of the recommendations you’ll see is to change your bid strategy to another one, that will help your campaign perform better. When you first launch a PPC campaign for your transport business, it’s usually best to start with an automated bid strategy like Maximise Clicks to get as many clicks as possible.

And later you can change to another bid strategy like Manual CPC if you want to control the bids manually.

However, automated bidding is usually best because bids are set at auction time based on the context, which usually results in better performance.

 

5. Do competitor analysis

Doing some PPC competitor analysis for your transport business will help you to run better campaigns. This will help you see what some of your competitors are doing in their campaigns and how much they are spending on average.

A good tool to start with is SERanking which has some good resources to help you carry out this research. Its Competitor tool is packed with features to help you see what searches they appear for and in what positions and how much they pay for them.

And you’ll also see what Ads they are running and how much they spend in their Google Ads accounts per month on average.

 

6. Consider broad match keywords

After running your campaign for a while, you should consider adding new keywords to target more search queries. And a quick way to do that is to add broad match keyword versions of your phrase and exact match keywords.

This will lead to an increase in traffic and you’ll be able to target some search queries that you were not appearing  for before.

But, you’re also likely to get some searches that are not relevant. So, you should have a negative keyword list to block them as described above, or build the list as you find them.

 

7. Check Quality Scores

Part of your ongoing campaign management should include checking and improving your keyword quality scores. These scores show how well key parts of your campaigns are working.

To improve your quality scores, you should work on the three contributing factors: Expected Click Through Rate, Ad Relevance and Landing Page Experience.

For ad relevance and expected click through rate you should work on the keyword targeting to make sure this is highly related to the text ads in each ad group. And make sure the primary keywords are in the ads, and in headline one preferably.

 

Case Study

MK London Link is an express courier business that offers same day, overnight and national deliveries. When they contacted me they had been running campaigns for many years and competition was increasing with more courier businesses using Google Ads advertising. I set up a new Search campaign for them which led to a drop in the average cost per click to £3 and click through rate increased by 150%. Read the full case study.

 

Get in Touch

As a Google Ads consultant, I have a lot of experience setting up and managing PPC campaigns for transport businesses like courier companies. Contact me below to discuss your requirements.