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At Chariot, we work closely with our movers to improve their return on ad spend through Chariot's Ads & Marketing platform, which has helped us build a better understanding of the opportunities — and mistakes — that movers often make when running Google cost-per-click (CPC) ads.
Here are the most common — and most expensive — ways we see moving companies waste money on Google (cost-per-click (CPC) ads, and what to do instead.
DNI swaps the phone number on your website when someone arrives from an ad. Without it, you miss a huge chunk of attribution — a customer clicks your ad, visits your site, then calls the number listed there, and you never tie that call back to the ad that drove it.
If you're spending real money on Google Ads and don't have DNI set up, you're flying blind.
A lot of attribution relies only on the moment a customer filled out a web form. But the full customer journey matters. We've found jobs where the customer clicked an ad, came back organically days later, and then booked. If you only look at the last click, that ad gets no credit — when it should.
Chariot looks back 90 days, combining:
Together these usually tell a much clearer story than a single form-fill.
There's some defensive value in bidding on your own company name if you dominate your market (though see #4). But for many movers, it doesn't pay off. These "ad leads" are often:
That makes the ads look better than they are — you're paying ~$20 a click for customers who were already going to buy.
Saw this one recently: about a third of a campaign's budget was going to competitor keywords like "Two Men and a Truck."
The campaign got clicks — but because Chariot was passing actual booked revenue back into Google, we could see those clicks produced basically $0 in revenue and were dragging down ROAS.
For most movers, broad moving-intent and local keywords perform far better than trying to intercept people already searching for a competitor.
Bigger isn't always better. One mover we work with — using Chariot for tracking, but not Chariot-managed ads — spent ~$7K in a single month on a campaign that produced zero ROAS.
If you're new to a market, spend enough to get real data, but don't scale aggressively until you understand:
More obvious, but we still see it constantly: campaigns generating plenty of calls where the recordings show the lead went unanswered or hit voicemail. That's painful when you're paying $10–$25+ per click or call and missing out on multi-thousand-dollar jobs.
A few ways to fix it:
The common advice is that your quote form should be SHORT — it's 2026, everyone's busy, no one fills out long forms...right?.
It's not that simple.
Short forms can lift lead volume, but they also tend to generate low-intent, low-information leads that are hard for sales to work — and they inflate the apparent success of ad campaigns if you're not tying back to revenue. Most movers understand this intuitively; it's the same reason they're willing to turn away smaller, price-sensitive customers.
I'm a believer in shorter forms, but at a minimum capture:
And if your form is very short, make sure you can call back near-instantly. Otherwise you're just creating more chasing for your team while a competitor who got more info upfront wins the job.
The best campaigns don't just tell Google "this click became a lead" — which is how the vast majority of mover campaigns I see are run. They tell Google "this click became a booked job worth $4,200 — go get me more like that."
Once you have enough data, optimizing for conversion value rather than lead volume can make a real difference in ROAS. To get there:
Ready to move?