Scrap metal collection Melbourne: 222 enquiries in a month at $8.91 each

A scrap dealer cannot put the price up

Scrap metal is one of the few trades where the business does not set its own price. The metal is worth what it is worth on the day, decided by commodity markets a long way from Melbourne, and it moves. You cannot pass a marketing cost on to the customer, because the customer is paid by weight against a price you do not control.

Two levers, then. How cheaply the work is found, and how full the truck is when it moves.

The truck is the whole business

A run costs the same in fuel, wages and hours whether it comes back loaded or half empty. An empty slot in a driver's day is not a missed opportunity. It is a cost you have already paid for.

An enquiry is therefore worth more than the metal sitting on it. It is worth the gap in the day it fills, plus the second pickup it makes possible because the truck was already headed that way.

The searches all look the same

Here is where it gets awkward. Scrap collection in Melbourne is one of the noisiest categories in the trade. A licensed dealer bids against wreckers, cash-for-metal operators, ute crews working weekends, and a long tail of people happy to pay for any search with the word “cash” in it.

The searches themselves are barely distinguishable from one another. A builder stripping a site and a household with a bag of drink cans use almost identical words. Only one of them is a job worth sending a truck to.

Licensed dealers also carry costs the weekend crews do not — compliance, record-keeping, proper handling, insurance — and none of it shows up in a search result. The auction treats every bidder as equivalent, so a dealer with real overheads buys clicks against operators whose whole cost base is a ute and a Saturday. On a modest monthly ad budget, a few pointless clicks a day is the difference between a campaign that pays for the truck and one that quietly does not.

What we took on

FAIZI Metals is a licensed scrap metal dealer in Melbourne that needed collection jobs rather than tyre-kickers. This is a young account and we would rather say so than dress it up: a short history, run through a single search campaign. The window we report is one measured period, chosen at random and printed without its dates.

Only one period ran long enough to report on properly. Everything below is either that period or the wider account. The short stretches at either end are not presented as months, because they were not months.

The work was to rebuild the account around enquiries that end in a booked collection, then keep working it. Scrap moves with commodity prices and with whatever the competition is doing that week, so this is not a category where you set something up and check back three months later. Two accounts can look identical on paper and produce completely different work. How it is done is not something we publish.

An 18-day period: 222 enquiries at $8.91 each

Across 18 days of trading the account produced 222 tracked enquiries at $8.91 each, from 1,051 clicks and 36,582 impressions.

More than one click in five became an enquiry in that period — a conversion rate of 21.12%.

The impression figure is worth sitting with. The ads were shown 36,582 times over those days and drew 1,051 clicks. A great deal of appearing, comparatively little clicking — which is what you want in a category this contaminated. Present for the searches, without paying for the crowd that was never going to book a collection.

Does the period hold up against the wider account?

Take the account as a whole rather than that one stretch. It produced 350 tracked enquiries from 1,813 clicks and 48,868 impressions, at $10.20 each and a 19.31% conversion rate, with a 3.71% click-through rate.

That is the useful cross-check. The account-wide figures sit close to the period's own, which points to the account working rather than a fluke week flattering the report. Had that stretch been a spike, the wider numbers would sag below it. They do not.

• 222 enquiries at $8.91 each — an 18-day period in 2026
• 21.12% of clicks became an enquiry — the same period
• 1,051 clicks from 36,582 impressions — the same period
• 350 enquiries from 1,813 clicks and 48,868 impressions — over the wider account
• $10.20 cost per enquiry and a 19.31% conversion rate — account-wide
• 3.71% click-through rate — account-wide

Each figure belongs to the period beside it. None is an average, and none is a projection of what any other account would do.

What it changed for the business

A collection business lives or dies on how full the run is. 222 enquiries inside 18 days is a schedule the office has to manage rather than a trickle it has to chase. Sequencing pickups, grouping them by direction, deciding what can wait until tomorrow — that is the problem you want. Chasing work costs time you never get back, and produces nothing at all on the days there is nothing to chase.

Cheap enquiries change the shape of the business as well. Small pickups stop being marginal. A dealer can afford to say yes to the one-off domestic job, and that job is often how a company meets the builder who rings back three months later with a full site strip. Expensive enquiries force a business to decline the small work, and declining small work quietly closes the door on the large work behind it. At $8.91 an enquiry, that door stays open.

There is a cashflow effect too. Scrap income arrives in lumps and the metal price moves under you. A channel producing enquiries at a predictable, low cost gives the owner one input they can plan around while the other swings. When prices are good, a business that can fill a truck this week captures the window. One that has to go looking does not.

The honest caveat: this is one strong month inside a short history, not a long track record. Only one period ran long enough to judge. It is what the account has done so far, printed as it stands.

Key takeaways

• A scrap dealer cannot price around marketing costs, because the metal price is set elsewhere. Cheap enquiries and full runs are the only levers.
• An 18-day period in 2026 produced 222 tracked enquiries at $8.91 each, with 21.12% of clicks converting.
• Over the wider account, 350 enquiries came in at $10.20 each from 1,813 clicks — close enough to the period's own figures to suggest the month was real rather than a spike.
• At under ten dollars an enquiry, small domestic pickups become viable again, and those are frequently how a dealer meets the commercial work behind them.
• This is one solid month in a young account. We are not calling it a track record.

Frequently asked questions

What does a scrap metal collection lead cost in Melbourne?

In this account, $8.91 in the measured period and $10.20 taken over the whole account. That is one licensed Melbourne dealer's account with one solid month behind it, not a market rate.

How do you stop paying for people with a bag of cans?

By treating the near-identical searches as different problems, and building the account around enquiries that end in a booked collection. We do not publish the mechanics. The evidence it worked is that 21.12% of clicks became an enquiry in that period, on a small budget, in a category where most traffic is not worth having.

Is a small monthly budget enough for scrap collection?

It produced 222 enquiries inside a single 18-day period. Small budgets here are less forgiving rather than unworkable. There is no room to fund the wrong clicks while you go looking for the right ones.

Why report 18 days instead of a whole month?

Because that is what the account ran. Presenting 18 days of trading as a full month without saying so would make it look busier than it was. We count the days the ads were actually live, and we say how many.

Want a straight read on your own account?

Anyone can show you a good month. The harder question is whether it was the account working or the calendar being kind — worth asking about ours as much as yours. If you run a collection, recycling or trade services business in Melbourne and want someone to open your account and say plainly what it produces per dollar, talk to SoudCoh. No forecast, just what the numbers say.