Most logistics companies do not have a Google Ads problem. They have a lead-quality problem that Google Ads makes expensive very quickly.
Type "logistics company" into Google and four completely different people are searching that phrase: someone looking for a job, a student writing an assignment, a homeowner shipping one carton overseas, and a manufacturer with forty containers a month who is genuinely worth winning. Google cannot tell them apart. If your campaign is not built to tell them apart, you pay the same click price for all four and your sales team spends its week on the wrong three.
Our Google Ads packages for logistics are built around that single problem. Lead quality is the product. Everything else — bidding, budgets, ad copy, landing pages — is downstream of it.
Freight and transport advertisers face a harder auction than most B2B categories. Clicks on serious commercial terms regularly land between four and eleven dollars in the US and UK, and a genuine contract enquiry can cost anywhere from seventy to well over two hundred dollars depending on service line and market. That is not necessarily expensive — a single won 3PL account can be worth six figures a year. It becomes expensive when three-quarters of the spend goes to traffic that was never going to ship anything.
The four leaks we find in almost every logistics account we audit:
"Logistics jobs", "driver vacancy", "warehouse job near me", "supply chain career" — these queries share vocabulary with your money keywords and, on broad match, they will get served your ads. In some accounts we have inherited, employment-intent traffic alone was consuming 30–40% of monthly spend.
"What is 3PL", "types of logistics", "logistics meaning", "supply chain management course". Informational, high-volume, zero commercial value at the bottom of the funnel.
Someone sending a single parcel to a relative abroad is not a bad person to reach — but if you are a contract freight forwarder, they are not your customer, and their queries are cheap to click and impossible to convert into an account.
Load boards, lead resellers and directories bid on the same terms and inflate CPCs across the board.
The fix is not clever bidding. It is architecture — separating intent before the auction ever happens.
Logistics is not one advertising problem. It is two, and they need two different account structures, two different budgets and two different definitions of success.
Thin search volume. Expensive clicks. Long RFQ and tender cycles measured in weeks or months. Multiple decision-makers. The conversion on the website is a quote request or a discovery call — not a sale.
For this funnel we judge performance on quoted opportunities and won accounts, not raw form fills. That means offline conversion tracking is mandatory from day one, not a phase-two nice-to-have. Optimising a freight forwarding campaign to "form submissions" teaches Google's bidding to find you the cheapest form submitters, which is exactly the wrong instruction.
High volume. Fast decisions. Phone-heavy. Mobile-heavy. Often same-day intent. The searcher wants a price and a pickup slot, and they will call the first credible option.
Here we optimise for cost per booked job, run call-only and call-extension-led campaigns, use tight radius targeting, and pace budgets by hour of day rather than spreading them flat.
Running both of these through one campaign — which is what most inherited accounts do — means the high-volume cheap traffic eats the budget and the high-value contract traffic never gets impression share. Separating them is usually the single biggest performance improvement we make in the first ninety days.
If you also need drivers, owner-operators or carrier partners, we build that as a deliberately separate campaign with its own budget, its own landing pages and its own conversion actions.
Two reasons. First, it protects your commercial campaigns from recruitment queries and vice versa. Second, recruitment advertising has completely different economics — you are measuring cost per qualified application and cost per seated driver, and those numbers have no business being averaged into your freight cost-per-lead report.
Clients who have tried to run recruitment inside their sales campaign usually discover the same thing: the recruitment ads win the auction more often because the queries are cheaper, and the sales budget quietly disappears into applications.
A national radius setting is the laziest way to run a logistics campaign and one of the most expensive.
We target the way you actually sell: by lane. Origin–destination pairs, port catchments, freight corridors, industrial estates, free-trade and bonded zones, and the specific postcodes around your depots.
That means:
Conventional PPC advice says strip your form down to name and email to maximise conversions. In logistics that advice is actively harmful.
A three-field form gets you volume. It also gets you tyre-kickers, students, and someone shipping one suitcase. We build qualifying forms — commodity, volume or frequency, origin and destination, incoterm where relevant, and timeline. Conversion rate drops. Cost per lead rises. Cost per quoted opportunity falls, often sharply, and your sales team stops wasting hours.
On the phone side we set call-duration thresholds so only calls past a meaningful length count as conversions, which stops wrong-number and job-enquiry calls from training the bidding algorithm.
This is the part most logistics PPC providers skip, and it is where the compounding gains live.
We connect your CRM — Salesforce, Zoho, HubSpot, or a custom pipeline — and push conversion stages back into Google Ads: enquiry received, qualified, quoted, won, plus the account value where you can share it. Smart Bidding then optimises toward the leads that actually became business, not the leads that were easiest to collect.
In practical terms, after three to four months of clean offline data, campaigns start self-selecting toward higher-value shipper profiles without anyone touching a bid. That is not a trick; it is just giving the machine the right target.
We use Performance Max where it earns its place, but always with guardrails: brand exclusions, account-level negatives, asset group discipline and a search-themes strategy — never as an unsupervised catch-all across a lead-gen account.
Cross-border trucking, customs brokerage and drayage carry the highest CPCs in the category. Brand defence against load boards and lead resellers matters more here than anywhere else.
Post-Brexit customs, EORI, and clearance queries remain a strong and under-served intent cluster. Port-adjacent targeting around Felixstowe, Southampton, Dover and Immingham consistently outperforms national settings.
Interstate freight, regional and remote delivery, and mining and agricultural supply chains. Long distances make lane-level structuring especially valuable.
A forwarding and transhipment hub with a small, expensive, highly competitive auction. Regional and multi-language ad copy for Southeast Asian corridors is worth testing.
High volume, but heavily polluted with lead-reseller and aggregator traffic in the packers-and-movers space. Aggressive negative-keyword work and brand defence are non-negotiable. Domestic FTL, warehousing and export forwarding are the cleaner intent pools.
Every package below starts with an audit, because quoting a management fee before seeing an account is guesswork. Final scope and pricing are confirmed after that audit.
For carriers, courier firms and regional operators running one core service.
For freight forwarders, 3PLs and multi-branch transport companies.
For large operators, cross-border networks and companies running sales plus recruitment.
We have run paid search for freight forwarders, courier networks, warehousing operators and cross-border transport companies across the US, UK, Canada, Australia, Singapore and India. That range matters, because a customs-clearance campaign in the UK and a packers-and-movers campaign in Delhi NCR fail for completely different reasons.
What we commit to:
The Google Ads account is yours, in your billing, with your data history. If you leave, you keep everything.
If a lane is not working, the report says so. We would rather pause spend than defend it.
We ask your sales team which leads were good and which were junk, every month, and we act on it.
Contract freight campaigns need a full quarter before offline conversion data is meaningful. Anyone promising qualified shipper leads in week two is selling you form fills.
We review your existing account, search terms, landing pages and conversion setup, and send a written findings document — whether or not you go ahead.
We agree service lines, priority lanes, target markets and what a qualified lead means to you.
Account structure, negatives, tracking, forms and landing pages, typically inside two to three weeks.
Search-term review, bid and budget shifts, ad testing, and CRM data feeding back into bidding.
Once cost per quoted opportunity is stable, we scale budget into the lanes that are earning.
It depends on service line and market. Transactional courier and last-mile campaigns can show results from a modest monthly budget. Contract freight forwarding and 3PL campaigns generally need enough budget to gather meaningful conversion data across a long sales cycle — typically a few thousand dollars a month in competitive Western markets. We size this during the audit rather than quoting blind.
Almost certainly broad match without a proper negative-keyword structure. Employment-intent queries share most of their vocabulary with commercial logistics queries. This is fixable, usually within the first two weeks, and it is the first thing we address in any account.
Transactional services often produce enquiries in the first month. Contract freight typically takes 60–90 days before lead quality stabilises, because Smart Bidding needs enough offline conversion data to learn what a good lead looks like in your pipeline.
Yes. Direct shipper acquisition through paid search is usually the fastest route away from load-board dependency, though it needs a landing page and sales process built for direct shippers rather than broker relationships.
Yes, as a separate campaign with its own budget and reporting. We do not blend recruitment and sales performance into one number.
Not usually. In most cases dedicated landing pages for your priority service lines are enough, and those are included from the Growth package upward.
Where it fits, with strict guardrails — brand exclusions, account-level negatives and disciplined asset groups. We do not hand a lead-generation budget to an unsupervised PMax campaign.
You do. It stays in your billing with your full history, and it remains yours if we stop working together.
Every package starts with an audit, because quoting a management fee before seeing an account is guesswork. We review your existing account, search terms, landing pages and conversion setup, and send a written findings document — whether or not you go ahead.
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