Carriers keep a bigger share of each job, and most of the industry treats that gap as a weakness. Priced into how you buy clicks, it can, in theory, win you a customer for less than a carrier pays.
Start by separating two marketplaces that get conflated constantly. Load boards, Central Dispatch and Super Loadboard among them, are capacity markets: brokers post vehicles that need moving, carriers pick up the loads. A load board is where your shipments get dispatched. It is not where your customers come from. No shipper searching "ship my car to Florida" ever lands on one.
Customer demand reaches brokers through two channels. Lead vendors resell quote-form submissions from their comparison sites, at published rates of $1.00 to $2.75 for leads shared with up to 10 brokerages and $20 to $25 for exclusive or call-transfer tiers, per the iMover Leads and Auto Transport Broker Leads pricing pages. Or the demand comes from ads you run on your own account, where every lead is exclusive because nobody else ever receives it. The vendor guide to auto transport lead providers covers the first channel. The rest of this page covers the second, because that is where broker economics get interesting.
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Request a Discovery Call →A carrier books the full move price and pays for trucks, drivers, fuel, and insurance. A broker books a fee on top of the carrier rate. The fee is smaller than the carrier's revenue, so on paper the broker has less room to spend on acquiring a customer.
Here is the operator view from Juan Colicchio, founder of LGG Media, who runs auto transport accounts at six figures per day in spend: a broker has a smaller margin than a carrier, and we bid on this margin. Theoretically the broker can spend less than a direct carrier to acquire the client. His reasoning: when the bid is anchored to the broker's actual fee rather than the headline move price, the algorithm stops chasing revenue the broker never keeps. A carrier bidding against you has to price customer acquisition against its own cost-heavy economics. A broker bidding on clean margin data competes on a smaller, truer number, and pays for exactly the customers that number supports. Treat that as operator reasoning from his accounts rather than a universal law: it holds when the margin data flowing into the bid is accurate, and it fails when the account bids on inflated values.
Google's bidding can only optimize what it is fed. Three published mechanics make margin bidding possible.
Conversion values: before value bidding can run, each conversion needs a value, which Google covers in About Target ROAS bidding, along with the requirement of at least 15 conversions in 30 days for Search campaigns. Offline conversion import: because a brokered load closes in the CRM rather than on the website, the outcome returns to Google via offline conversion imports, matched to the originating click ID. Google began migrating this path to enhanced conversions for leads via its Data Manager API in June 2026, so new integrations should start there. Value-based bidding: with real margins attached to real clicks, Target ROAS spends toward searches that produce fee revenue and starves the ones that produce quote collectors.
On LGG Media accounts, the bid runs on ROAS using the value of the deposit, and cost per lead is not tracked at all. Deposit value is the earliest number that reflects real intent, and bidding on it keeps quality and volume up at scale because the algorithm learns from your CRM rather than from form fills. Cost per lead is the wrong unit in this vertical: lead quality varies so widely that the cost of one lead can approach the cost of acquiring one customer.
The published proof is a brokerage that started with zero infrastructure in October 2025. Three months of tracking architecture at $700 per day, then a 21-day scale event to $10,000 to $12,000 per day in spend, $20,000 to $24,000 per day in revenue, and a sustained 2.0x ROAS with 86 percent attribution accuracy at four months, all documented in the auto transport case study.
Against the case study's published unit economics, a $450 average order value and a $350 customer acquisition cost, the margin math above stops being theory. The measurement standard behind it is documented too: in our attribution benchmark, lead generation traced 95.9 percent of merchant-verified revenue back to a click. You cannot bid on margin you cannot trace.
One operational risk deserves its own line. At six figures per day in spend, seasonality is the constraint Juan flags: snowbird corridors reverse direction twice a year, and budgets that do not move with them burn. Nothing else in this vertical has broken at that spend level on his accounts.
One structural mistake shows up in almost every broker account we audit, and it belongs in any discussion of broker leads: shipper demand and carrier recruitment bleeding into the same campaigns. Shippers are revenue. Carriers are capacity. A search for "car hauler jobs" or "dispatch login" will happily click a shipper ad, and every one of those clicks is budget spent recruiting someone who will never pay you a fee.
The fix is boring and it works. Aggressive negative keywords on recruitment intent: driver jobs, load board, hauler pay, dispatch login. Carrier-facing pages excluded from shipper retargeting pools. Separate campaigns end to end if you advertise for carrier capacity at all. The load board handles your carrier side. Your ad budget should only ever touch the shipper side, because that is the side your broker fee comes from, and the side your margin data can teach the algorithm to grow.
This separation also protects the bid signal itself. Value-based bidding learns from every conversion you feed it. Let recruitment traffic convert on a shipper form even occasionally, and the algorithm starts hunting for more truckers. Clean campaign boundaries keep the CRM data flowing into your bids as pure shipper economics.
Sensible when your spend is too low to train value bidding, or when your desk needs dial volume immediately. Know what you are buying: the same contact as up to 9 competitors, and a race you win with response speed. The comparison of exclusive versus shared auto transport leads prices that race precisely.
Sensible once your spend is high enough that the volume exists to train value bidding on your margin data. The full method, dispatch-locked conversions included, is on the auto transport lead generation page.
Quote requests from shippers who need a vehicle moved, routed to brokerages rather than directly to carriers. They come from two sources: vendor networks that resell one shipper inquiry to multiple brokerages, or ads a brokerage runs on its own account, which produce leads nobody else receives.
Published 2026 vendor rates run $1.00 to $1.25 per lead at iMover Leads for leads sent to 10 brokers, and $2.75 to $25 at Auto Transport Broker Leads depending on tier, with $20 buying exclusivity and $25 buying a live call transfer. Building your own pipeline replaces a per-lead price with a cost per acquired customer that your bidding controls.
No. Load boards such as Central Dispatch are capacity marketplaces where brokers find carriers to move booked vehicles. They sit on the supply side of the business. Customer demand comes from lead vendors or from your own advertising, never from the board.
Because lead quality in this vertical varies so much that cost per lead predicts almost nothing, and the cost of one lead can approach the cost of acquiring one customer. Bidding on deposit value from your CRM makes the algorithm optimize toward revenue you keep. On LGG Media accounts, cost per lead is not tracked at all.
In theory, yes. A broker bidding on its real fee margin gives the algorithm a smaller, cleaner target than a carrier bidding against cost-heavy full-move economics. It is operator reasoning, proven on specific accounts rather than guaranteed: it depends on accurate margin data flowing back to the platform through offline conversion imports (or enhanced conversions for leads, the path Google now recommends for new integrations).
Vendor pricing: iMover Leads published packages and Auto Transport Broker Leads published pricing, retrieved August 2026. Platform mechanics: Google Ads Help, About Target ROAS bidding and About offline conversion imports. Results and unit economics: LGG Media auto transport case study. Traceability: LGG Media attribution benchmark.
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