Half the junk removal businesses we profiled sell more than junk removal. We profiled 12 in our example market, Charlotte, North Carolina, and six of them also rent roll-offs, knock down sheds and decks, or move households: Junk King, College HUNKS, Junk Raider, Alago, Move It! and A-1. That's smart business. A customer who wants a roll-off this month may want a crew next month, and a truck that sits idle on Tuesday can haul a demolition load instead.
It's also a trap the day Performance Max goes live. Performance Max puts one budget and one bundle of headlines, photos and video to work everywhere Google sells ads at once: the search page, Maps, YouTube, Gmail and the sites that carry Google's display ads. By default it also chooses which page of your site each person lands on. A hauler with a dumpster page, a demolition page and a moving page has given it plenty to choose from, and Google's choice for someone searching "couch removal" isn't always the page that hauls couches.
This chapter covers when Performance Max should start, and the fences to put up before it does.
Performance Max Waits for About 30 Booked Hauls a Month. Exact and Broad Match Get There First.
Performance Max is the third campaign in this method, after Isolation (exact match, bids set by hand) and Exploration (broad match, bid by Google toward a target cost per booking). It isn't a starting point, because it learns from what the account already knows. A new account knows nothing.
The gate is the same kind of number Chapter 6 used for Exploration, held for longer. When Isolation and Exploration together keep logging about 30 booked hauls a month, Performance Max has something to learn from. For most junk removal companies that lands around month six or seven. A hauler running several trucks on a bigger budget can get there well before that; the bookings decide, not the date.
Two settings at launch:
- Bid for conversions, not value. Performance Max can chase conversion value, but a junk removal account often doesn't have enough clean job-value data in month six to steer by. Count booked hauls first.
- No target cost per booking yet. Let the campaign spend its first weeks finding where bookings come from. Add the target once it has a record of its own, using the same arithmetic Chapter 7 handed to Exploration.
Isolation and Exploration keep running when Performance Max starts, and they'll often qualify for the same search. Google settles it with a published order. Top priority goes to an exact match keyword that spells out precisely what was searched; Google's help page ranks that keyword ahead of every broad or phrase keyword and ahead of Performance Max itself. So "hot tub removal" in Isolation keeps going to the hot tub ad group you built and bid by hand. Next come phrase and broad keywords and Performance Max search themes that match the search word for word. After that, Google picks whichever ad group or asset group it judges most relevant, and Ad Rank breaks any tie.
In practice, that means Performance Max mostly earns its keep on the searches and placements your Search campaigns never covered: YouTube, Gmail, the map, and wordings nobody wrote down. That's where it should be judged, too. If it seems to be booking jobs your exact keywords used to book, check the search terms before giving it credit.
Before any of that, one hauler-specific question: does the website give each service its own page? College HUNKS' Charlotte location page sells moving and junk removal on the same page. Alago lists every junk job on a single services page. Neither is wrong for a visitor, but Performance Max can only be pointed at pages that exist. If junk removal, dumpsters and moving share a page, no setting in Google Ads can separate them. That's a website job, and Chapter 4 covers it.
Final URL Expansion Comes Switched On, So a Couch Search Can Land on a Dumpster Page
The setting behind the trap is called Final URL expansion. Google's help confirms it starts switched on in every Performance Max campaign. Left on, Google is free to send a couch searcher to whichever page of your site it decides looks closest to what they typed. Google also warns that this "can sometimes lead to ads pointing to unintended pages if not managed carefully with URL exclusions."
For a junk-only hauler, that risk is mostly the blog and the careers page. For a hybrid, it's the whole other half of the business. A person searching "couch removal" wants someone to carry the couch out. Chapter 5 found that dumpster shoppers plan to do the loading themselves; demolition buyers are pricing a teardown; moving customers want their couch delivered, not discarded. Landing any of them on the wrong page costs the click and, often, the job.
There are two ways to fence it:
- Keep expansion on and exclude pages. List the dumpster, demolition and moving pages, plus the blog, careers and any pricing page for services you don't want advertised, as URL exclusions. Google keeps the freedom to choose among your junk removal pages.
- Turn expansion off. Ads then go only to the pages you named in your asset groups and any page feed you supply. It's tighter, and for a hybrid in its first months of Performance Max, it's the safer choice.
Either way, check the landing page report after the first two weeks. It shows the pages the campaign actually sent people to. Any surprise there is a URL to exclude that day.
Each Junk Service Gets Its Own Asset Group, and Dumpsters Get None
Inside a Performance Max campaign, the building block is the asset group. Google calls it "a collection of creatives centered on a theme": headlines, descriptions, images, videos and a logo, all tied to one final URL. A campaign can hold one asset group or several, and several is how you keep each service on its own page.
Build them the way Chapter 4 built the item pages. Couch and furniture removal gets an asset group that points at the furniture page. Mattress removal points at the mattress page. Appliances, hot tubs, and garage and estate cleanouts each get their own. Every asset group carries words and pictures about that one job, so the ad a person sees and the page they land on agree with each other.
Dumpster rental gets no asset group in this campaign at all. A hauler that rents roll-offs should run them as a separate campaign, with money, conversion counts and landing pages that belong to dumpsters alone; Chapter 15 sets that up. Mixing roll-off rentals into a junk removal Performance Max campaign teaches Google that a dumpster booking and a couch pickup are the same success, and they aren't.
What goes into each asset group:
- Your best Search headlines. By month six, Isolation and Exploration have shown which headlines bring bookings. Move those in. Chapter 8's arrival-window promise belongs here if dispatch can keep it.
- Real photos. Your trucks, your crew in uniform, a garage before and after. Stock photos of smiling movers in a white studio look like every other ad on the page.
- Real video. Performance Max shows video on YouTube whether you give it one or not; without one, Google may assemble its own from your images. A 30-second phone video of a crew loading a truck beats anything a template makes.
Your Name Belongs to the Brand Campaign. Franchise Names Belong on the Negative List.
Give it the chance and Performance Max will chase the people typing your company's name, then take credit for the booking. That's the cheapest booking in the account, and since month one it has belonged to the brand campaign. Handing that search to Performance Max makes the new campaign look better than it is and the brand campaign look worse.
Google's own advice covers this. Brand exclusions keep Performance Max off specific brand searches, "such as your own or a competitor's," and Google calls them "the recommended strategy if you manage brand traffic in a separate campaign." Add your company name as an excluded brand before launch.
The negative list from Chapter 5 comes along too. Performance Max now accepts negative keywords, so the franchise names, the "free couch removal" searches, the job hunters and, for haulers without dumpsters, the roll-off renters can be blocked here just as they are in Search. Keep the location setting on Presence, as Chapter 9 set it, so the ads stay inside the towns the trucks drive to.
Search Themes Should Come From the Searches That Booked a Truck, Not From Google's Guesses
Performance Max doesn't use keywords. It reads your website, your assets and the hints you give it. The strongest hints are search themes and audience signals, and both should come from what the account has already proven.
Search themes are phrases you give Google to describe what your customers search for. Google allows up to 50 and asks that they be distinct, not close variants of each other. You don't have to guess at them. Open the search terms reports from Isolation and Exploration, filter to the searches that produced bookings, and copy in the distinct ones: "hot tub removal," "estate cleanout," "storage unit cleanout," "appliance haul away." Six months of bookings are a better guide than any brainstorm.
Audience signals work the same way. Before the campaign, build custom segments in the audience manager: people who searched your booked-job phrases, and people who browsed competitor websites. They aren't targeting fences; they're a starting point that tells Google what your customer looks like.
One last setting to leave off: the extra headlines Google writes with AI. Chapter 9 switched off text customization in Search for the same reason it stays off here. Your headlines should say what your crew actually does, in words your customers used.
If a Performance Max rollout for a junk-and-dumpster business sounds like a lot of fences to build, our Google Ads management handles it for haulers.
Next: Sofa and Mattress Shoppers Have an Old One That Has to Go
Google has no ready-made audience of people with junk to haul. It does know who's shopping for a new sofa or mattress, and every one of them has an old one somewhere. Chapter 11 covers how Demand Gen reaches them. For the settings these campaigns inherit, see Chapter 9.
You're reading Chapter 10 of Google Ads for Junk Removal, sixteen chapters written for haulers in every state.
