Key takeaways
- There is no honest industry-wide cost per lead for movers; your own cost per move run, by campaign, is the number to manage.
- Track four stages: lead, survey or estimate, booked move, move run. Cancellations sit between the last two.
- Costs rise at month-end and in summer partly because your own calendar fills, so a lead for a sold-out date cannot book.
- Most savings come after the click: faster estimates, flexible-date offers and separate pages for local and long-distance moves.
No one can give you an honest Google Ads cost per lead for a moving company, because a lead can be a one-bedroom local move or a cross-country household. The number that matters is your cost per move run: ad spend divided by the moves that actually happened. It comes from your ad account and your moving software, not from someone else's chart.
Cost per lead vs cost per booked move
Cost per lead tells you what Google charged for a call or form. Cost per booked move tells you what a deposit on your calendar cost. Between the two sit every missed call, every customer who only wanted a ballpark, and every estimate that went out two days late.
Moving adds one more gap: cancellations. A closing date slips, a lease gets extended, or the customer booked two movers to be safe. A booked move is not revenue until the truck rolls, so the honest number is cost per move run.
This is where the verification gap opens. Lead sellers and many agencies report leads, because leads are what they can count. Only your own records show which of those leads became moves. If a report cannot be checked against your moving software, treat it as a claim.
Worked example (hypothetical round numbers, not a benchmark). Say you spend one month on two campaigns:
| Local moves | Long-distance moves | |
|---|---|---|
| Spend | $3,000 | $3,000 |
| Leads (calls and quote forms) | 100 | 30 |
| Cost per lead | $30 | $100 |
| Surveys or estimates completed | 60 | 20 |
| Moves booked with a deposit | 30 | 6 |
| Cancelled before move day | 5 | 1 |
| Moves run | 25 | 5 |
| Cost per move run | $120 | $600 |
On cost per lead, long distance looks more than three times worse. Whether its cost per move run is good depends on what a long-distance move earns you after crew, fuel and truck time, and only your books know that.
From cost per lead to cost per booked move
- Leads you pay for Where it leaks: Spam and wrong numbers
- Real inquiries Where it leaks: Calls nobody answers
- Conversations Where it leaks: Quoted, never followed up
- Booked move Your real number: cost per booked move
Calculating your number
- Pick a period that includes a month-end. A quiet mid-month week flatters or punishes every campaign. Compare like months when you can.
- Pull spend by campaign. Keep local, long-distance, packing and storage campaigns separate, so each carries its own cost.
- Count real leads. Use Google's call tracking for calls from ads and your site, set a minimum call length to drop hang-ups, and merge customers who filled in a quote form and then called (call tracking).
- Tag the source in your moving software. Set the lead source on each opportunity in SmartMoving, Supermove or your CRM, so ads, organic, referrals and repeat customers stay apart.
- Count each stage. Surveys done, moves booked with a deposit, cancellations and moves run, for the same period and campaign.
- Divide. Spend divided by moves run is your cost per move run. Spend divided by surveys done shows whether the problem is the ads or the estimate.
- Send outcomes back to Google. Import booked moves as conversions, so automated bidding learns from deposits rather than form fills (conversion measurement).
Why costs rise around summer peak and end-of-month move dates
Costs rise at the summer peak and near month-end because leases end, closings cluster and families move between school years, and every mover in your area raises budgets for the same dates. More bidders push up what each click costs.
The second effect is your own calendar. Once your crews are booked for the last weekend of the month, a lead asking for that date cannot book, however good it is. You paid full price for it anyway. Owners often read this as lead quality falling when it is really capacity running out.
Mid-month weekdays and the colder months run the other way. Clicks are often cheaper and customers more flexible, but there are fewer of them, and long-distance customers plan further ahead. Set budgets month by month rather than one flat number all year.
Lowering cost per booked move
The cheapest savings sit between the click and the deposit, not in the bid.
- Send an estimate the same day. Customers collect several quotes. A virtual survey slot offered on the first call keeps you in the comparison.
- Offer the dates you have. When month-end is sold out, offer a mid-month or weekday date, and hold any price incentive for those dates rather than discounting the peak.
- Separate local and long-distance traffic. Local searchers want an hourly rate and crew size; long-distance searchers want an inventory-based quote. One page serves neither well.
- Cut searches that never book. Truck rental, moving jobs and DIY searches cost clicks. A maintained negative keyword list stops paying for them.
- Protect booked moves. Deposits, confirmation texts and a check-in call a week out reduce the cancellations that quietly inflate your number.
- Answer every call during the peak. A missed call in June is a paid lead handed to the next mover on the list. A missed-call text back recovers some of them.
How VETS Growth Marketing helps
We connect your Google Ads account to the outcomes in your moving software, so every campaign shows cost per booked move and cost per move run, not just cost per lead. The account stays in your name, the setup runs as a dated project, and you see the numbers by month, including the month-end weeks. Bring a month of spend and booking data to a growth consultation and we will work out your cost per move run, campaign by campaign, with you.
Sources
- About conversion measurement, Google Ads Help
- Set up tracking calls to a phone number on a website, Google Ads Help