One truck, one phone number, one Google Ads account, and click prices that run three to one. In our example market, Charlotte, North Carolina, Keyword Planner's top-of-page range for "mattress disposal" reaches $6.61. "Appliance removal" reaches $10.01, "couch removal" $15.00, "hot tub removal" $15.86, "junk removal" $18.42 and "junk pickup" $21.68.
Those figures are estimates drawn from past auctions, not prices on a menu. In our experience, real costs land within about 30% either side of them once an account is running. What they can't tell you is which of those searches books a truck. A brand-new account doesn't know that yet, and neither does Google.
So for the first stretch of the account, a person decides what each click is worth, one item at a time, and changes it as the bookings come in. That's what this chapter covers: how to set the bids, which columns tell you when to move them, and the number they hand to broad match later.
A $101 Mattress Job and a $400 Truckload Shouldn't Share One Bid
The first campaign is the one we call Isolation: exact match, every bid typed in by hand. Isolation is our label; you won't find it in Google's menus. The bidding inside it is Manual CPC, which does what the name says. You name the highest price a single click may cost, and outside of bid adjustments, the charge stays at or under that number.
Google lets you set that limit in two places. Every ad group gets a default bid that covers all its keywords, which is where you start. When one keyword inside a group clearly earns more than its neighbors, it can carry a bid of its own. Chapter 4 built one ad group per item, so in practice the bid follows the item.
The items are worth very different amounts. 1-800-GOT-JUNK publishes averages from its own jobs: $101 for a mattress across 5,630 jobs, $125 for a sofa, $130 for a refrigerator. A junk-only job averaged $399 in Junk King's franchise disclosure and $405 in College HUNKS'. Your own prices may differ, but the gap between a single item and a loaded truck won't.
Now run Chapter 3's math on each one. That chapter gave a $399 job a $100 marketing budget, about a quarter of the invoice, and worked back to a click ceiling of about $3.67 at a 50% close rate and a 7.33% conversion rate. Apply the same quarter to a mattress and the ceiling drops to about 93 cents. A sofa allows about $1.15, a refrigerator about $1.19.
Every one of those single-item ceilings sits below the bottom of its search's range. The truckload ceiling barely reaches the bottom of the range for "junk removal."
That's not a reason to drop mattress searches. It's a reason to know which item ad groups are carrying the account and which are along for the ride, and the only way to find out is to run them with bids a person controls. A planner range is the market's opinion. Your bookings are the fact.
Two rules for the opening bids. First, start at the top of what your own numbers allow, not at the bottom. Quality Score begins with no history, and a timid bid on a new account buys too few clicks to learn anything. Ease off as the account builds a record. Second, don't read the most expensive search as the most valuable. "Junk pickup" carries the highest range in the example market, and it's also the search Chapter 2 found mixed with people hoping the city will come for free. A high range only means other advertisers pay a lot for it.
The Ad Groups That Book Hauls Deserve the Top of the Page 75-90% of the Time
Once the ads run, four columns tell you how each ad group is doing at the top of the page. Add them to the ad group view and leave them there.
- Search top impression share. Of every auction where the ad qualified for the top ads, the percentage where it actually landed there.
- Search absolute top impression share. The slice of those qualifying auctions where your ad sat in first place, above every other hauler.
- Search lost top impression share (rank). The percentage of top spots that went elsewhere because the ad's Ad Rank fell short.
- Search lost top impression share (budget). How often you missed them because the money ran out.
Our working target is 75-90% search top impression share on the ad groups that actually book hauls. Not every item needs it. A mattress group running at 40% while its bookings cost more than the job pays doesn't need a bigger bid; it needs a better page or a smaller role. The groups that fill the trucks should be at the top most of the time.
The two "lost" columns are the diagnosis. A haul missed to rank is fixed with a bid, a sharper item ad or a better item page, the work Chapter 4 laid out. A haul missed to budget is a money problem, and raising the bid makes it worse, because each click then costs more out of the same day's budget.
Quality Score sits in the keyword view, scored 1 to 10. Google files it under diagnostics; the auction itself never reads it. Treat a low score as a hint about the ad or the page, not as a dial you can turn.
Auction Insights Names the Haulers Pushing Your Ad Down the Page
Impression share tells you how often you made the top. Auction insights tells you who else was there. Google's Search version gives six numbers per rival: their impression share, how often they overlap you, how often you outrank them, how often they sit above you, and how often each lands at the top or the very top. Run it on one ad group at a time, because the rivals for "hot tub removal" aren't always the rivals for "mattress disposal." Below 10% impression share, the report shows nothing at all.
A junk removal auction holds more names than one search would show you. In our example market, Google's Ads Transparency Center showed recent Search ads from every national junk brand we checked except one, and the franchise brands ran them through separate owner accounts, territory by territory, as Chapter 5 found. Only 8 of the 37 local hauler and dumpster websites we checked had run a Search ad in the previous 90 days. Five waste and dumpster companies were advertising too.
Position above rate is the column to read first. It's how often a rival's ad sat above yours when both showed. If one name holds a high position above rate on your couch group and nowhere else, that's a couch question, not an account-wide one.
Overlap rate adds the second half of the picture: how often that rival appeared at all when you did. A franchise owner at 70% overlap on hot tub removal is in nearly every one of your hot tub auctions. One at 10% just passes through now and then. Read the two columns together. A rival with high overlap and a high position above rate is the one setting the price of that item's top spot. One caution from Google itself: the impression share it shows for a competitor is measured against your auctions, not theirs, so it can differ from what that competitor sees in its own account.
An Ad Group That Costs More per Booking Than the Haul Pays Loses Its Bid
Some item auctions turn into a bidding war you can't win at a profit. If the couch group's cost per booking runs past what a couch job brings in, and one deep-pocketed rival keeps sitting above you, back off: trim the bid or pause the group, and spend that money on the items where you're winning. Leaving an auction is a bid decision too. It just doesn't feel like one.
Before you trust any cost per booking, listen to the calls behind it. Use the recordings in your phone system or call tracking tool. A booking count is only as honest as the calls inside it, and junk removal attracts calls that aren't customers: people asking whether you're the city's bulky pickup, dumpster shoppers who want a roll-off, job seekers, and price checks that end before an address comes up. Chapters 2 and 5 cut those searches from the keyword list. A few still get through, and they make an ad group look cheaper per booking than it really is, or more expensive, depending on how you count them.
Once you've listened, mark what each call really was, and set the bids from the bookings that held up.
Your Exact Keywords Already Showed What a Booked Haul Costs. Broad Match Doesn't Get to Guess.
Hand bidding has a finish line. When the account is logging about 30 quality conversions a month, usually around month two or three and sooner for a busy hauler with a bigger budget, the second campaign opens. We call it Exploration: broad match, with Google doing the bidding.
Google bids for Exploration through Maximize Conversions, steered by a target cost per acquisition. Nobody makes that target up. It comes from Isolation. Take what Isolation actually spent over the last month and divide it by the hauls it really booked. Say a hauler spent $3,000 and booked 30 hauls: $100 per booking, which matches the quarter-of-the-job budget Chapter 3 started with. That $100 becomes Exploration's target, and Google's automated bidding then raises or lowers each bid to hit it.
That's why the hand-bidding months matter. Without them, broad match would be bidding toward a number nobody has measured. With them, it inherits a cost per booking your own trucks proved.
Google advises aiming the bidding at one step of the path from lead to sale, a step that comes soon after the click and happens at least 15 times a month. For most haulers that's the qualified call or the booked job, set up in Chapter 1.
Isolation doesn't switch off when Exploration opens. Its bids stay in human hands, and Chapter 6 covered how the two campaigns share the work.
If setting a dozen bids by hand and listening to every call sounds like a second job, our Google Ads management handles the bidding for junk removal companies.
Next: Two of 143 Junk Ads Promise to Show Up on Time
The bids decide where the ad shows. The words decide whether anyone taps it. Chapter 8 looks at what junk removal ads say, and the promise customers care about most that almost none of them make. For how Isolation and Exploration divide the searches, see Chapter 6.
You're reading Chapter 7 of Google Ads for Junk Removal, sixteen chapters written for haulers in every state.
