Rubbish removal Perth: cost per lead down 53.18%

Bought in a hurry, on a thin margin

Rubbish Removal WA clears household junk, scrap metal, mattresses and general waste across Perth and the wider WA metro. It is high-frequency, low-consideration work: somebody has a pile of stuff, they want it gone this week, and they will ring whoever answers first with a sensible price. Cheap to advertise in principle. Very easy to overpay for in practice, because "rubbish removal" pulls in a lot of searches from people who are not ready to book anything.

The economics leave no room to be vague. A pickup is a truck, two people, a run to the tip and a tip fee, on a ticket measured in hundreds rather than thousands. Cost per enquiry has to sit well below what a single job earns, and it has to stay there, because there is no large-contract upside waiting to rescue a bad month. A category like plumbing can absorb an expensive enquiry because one in ten turns into a big job. This one cannot.

Search behaviour makes it harder again. Plenty of the people typing rubbish-related searches want their council's hard-waste collection date, the tip's opening hours, or somewhere to sell scrap rather than pay to have it taken. None of those can ever become a booking, and they sit in the middle of exactly the same language a paying customer uses.

When we started, that was showing. In the first of the periods below, the account was paying $71.02 for an enquiry. For a job at this ticket size, that is too much. Not a catastrophe — plenty of accounts live there — but it puts a hard ceiling on how much work the business can afford to buy.

What we took on

A set of measured periods across Perth and the wider WA metro, reported here without their dates on purpose. Over the wider account the ads were served 18,751 times and produced 1,620 clicks — an 8.64% click-through rate, well above what this category usually returns — converting 13.15% of them into an enquiry, 213 in all.

Those enquiries landed a few at a time rather than in clumps. In a business that runs trucks, that matters as much as the total, because a booking sheet filling a little every day is a different operational problem from one that fills in bursts.

The correction was a rebuild around the enquiries that end with a truck actually turning up: ads written to the specific pile the customer is trying to get rid of, and an account reshaped around the requests that become booked pickups. What we did is ours. What it produced is below, period by period.

Cost per enquiry down 53.18%

By the later period the cost of an enquiry had come down to $33.25 — a 53.18% reduction on the earlier period's $71.02 — and it did that on 45 enquiries, not on a quiet month with a flattering average.

Two months, two complete readings, less than half the cost between them.

The full monthly line adds context the two-bar comparison cannot. The first period is the high point at $71.02. The second drops to $33.55, the third settles at $33.25, and the fourth ticks back up to $36.60. We are pointing at that last movement rather than cropping it out. The gain held across three consecutive periods, but it did not keep improving, and the honest description of this account is that it found a level rather than that it is still falling.

Volume moved the opposite way to cost, which is the combination you want: 204 tracked enquiries across the four complete periods — 33 in the first, 71 in the second, 45 in the third and 55 in the fourth. The cheapest period was not the quietest. The busiest was within thirty cents of the cheapest.

• Cost per enquiry $71.02 in an earlier period → $33.25 in a later one, a 53.18% drop, on 45 enquiries in the cheaper of the two
• Best period for volume: 71 enquiries in a 31-day period in 2026 at $33.55 each, including 10 tracked calls, converting at 15.01%
• 213 enquiries and 40 tracked phone calls across the account's wider run
• The strongest campaign delivered 100 enquiries at $28.14 each
• Cost per enquiry taken over the whole account: $40.47

The cheapest period was 29 days long at $33.25. The busiest was 31 days at $33.55 with more volume. Two periods, stated as two periods.

What produced the change shows up in two supporting metrics. Click-through rate went from 6.92% in the first period to 10.16% in the third, 46.77% higher — more of the people seeing the ad decided it was meant for them. And the click-to-enquiry rate went from 13.47% in the first to 15.01% in the second, 11.44% higher. Better-matched traffic on both sides of the click, rather than one big lever.

A detail that surprises people in this trade: the enquiries mostly came as forms, not calls. Of the 213 recorded, 197 were submitted forms and 16 were calls placed straight from the ad, with 40 tracked phone calls account-wide. The assumption that removal customers always ring does not hold here. Device data has a similar twist — 1,236 of the 1,620 clicks came from mobile and produced 134 enquiries, while 351 desktop clicks produced 77. Desktop was a much smaller share of the traffic and a much larger share of the result.

Each of the three campaigns did real work: 100 enquiries at $28.14 each, 66 at $37.81 and 43 at $62.08, holding 34.30%, 38.07% and 42.44% impression share respectively. The two busiest individual days each put 7 enquiries in the inbox.

What it meant for the business

Halving the cost of an enquiry changes what a business like this is allowed to do. At $71.02 an enquiry, every dollar of budget has to be argued for. At $33.25, the same budget buys roughly twice the pipeline — which in rubbish removal means more pickups per truck, per day, off the same advertising commitment.

It also changes which jobs are worth chasing.

At $71.02 an enquiry, a single mattress or the corner of a garage cannot carry its own acquisition cost. At $33.25 it can.

Small jobs are what fill the gaps between the big ones and keep a truck earning across a whole day. When enquiries are dear, an operator has to hold out for full loads and watch the quiet hours go past.

Call volume is worth reading properly too. The last period produced 55 enquiries at $36.60 each with 18 tracked phone calls — the strongest of them all for calls — while over the wider account most enquiries arrived as a completed form. Both matter operationally: a call needs somebody free to answer it, a form can be worked through once the trucks are back. Right across the account the flow of both was steady, from Perth households and sites that needed something gone.

Have a look at your own numbers

If you run a removal, waste or trade business in Perth and your cost per enquiry has never really moved, it is worth finding out whether that is the market or the account. We will tell you which, and we will show you the working.