Trucking Lead Generation Case Study: 2,671 Leads at $10 CPL

Trucking LeadGen for Route One Transport: 2,671 Leads at $10 CPL

Niche: trucking services - ELD & GPS devices, dispatch, driver recruitment
Market: USA, nationwide
Channel: Facebook / Meta Lead Ads
Scope: 4 ad accounts, one per business line
Ad spend: ~$27,610
Leads: 2,671
Blended cost per lead: $10.34
Reach: ~256,000 accounts

My role: I led the strategy and ran these campaigns with my team - account structure, audience research, offers and creatives, native lead forms and daily budget control across all four accounts.
Four business lines, four different buyers: an owner-operator buying an ELD device, a fleet owner hiring dispatch, a driver looking for a job and a carrier that has to stay compliant.
Cost per lead ranged from $7.17 in the cheapest line to $59.15 in the hardest one - the numbers below are straight out of each ad account.

Where Things Stood at the Start

Route One Transport is one of the leading trucking companies in the U.S., serving truck drivers, owner-operators and trucking company owners. The company runs four separate business lines - R1 Go (ELD and GPS devices), R1 Dispatch (dispatch services), R1 Transport (driver recruitment) and ELD Expert (ELD compliance). Each line needed its own flow of leads, and each one sells to a completely different person.

Four funnels, one brand

An owner-operator buying a $200 device, a fleet owner outsourcing dispatch, a driver looking for a job and a carrier that has to stay compliant are four different buyers. One shared account and one generic offer would have averaged them into expensive, low-intent leads.

Driver recruitment is its own market

Hiring drivers means competing for attention with every carrier in the country, and the drivers worth hiring are already behind the wheel for someone else. Generic job ads get clicks and almost no applications.

Compliance has a small audience

ELD services sell to a narrow, well-defined group of carriers. The audience is small enough that ad frequency climbs quickly, and cost per lead climbs with it - this line was always going to be the expensive one.

Cheap leads are easy, qualified ones are not

Trucking is full of $2 leads that go nowhere. What the client needed was people who actually own trucks or actually intend to drive, not anyone willing to trade a phone number for a click.

What We Did

One playbook, four ad accounts, four different buyers. Here is what actually moved the numbers.

Split the account structure by business line so devices, dispatch, recruitment and compliance each had their own budget, audience and creatives

Wrote a separate offer and message for every buyer instead of running one brand campaign across all four lines

Ran native Meta lead forms with qualifying questions instead of landing pages, so unqualified requests were filtered before sales saw them

Built driver recruitment around video with real drivers and staff rather than static job ads - the video ad sets brought leads from $2.65

Launched Spanish and Ukrainian language versions for recruitment - the Spanish ad set alone produced 249 applications at $9.34 each

Rotated creatives and rebuilt audiences as frequency climbed, and moved budget daily across all four accounts

The Results

Four Meta ad accounts, one trucking group. Every figure below is taken straight from the client’s own ad accounts - the screenshots are further down the page.

Total ad spend across four accounts: ~$27,610
2,671 Facebook leads, about 256,000 accounts reached
Blended cost per lead: $10.34
R1 Dispatch - dispatch services: 1,450 leads at $7.55 ($10,951 spend, 52 ad sets)
R1 Transport - driver recruitment: 754 applications at $8.35 ($6,294 spend, 14 ad sets)
R1 Go - ELD & GPS devices: 332 leads at $7.17. ELD Expert - compliance: 135 leads at $59.15

The Numbers, Straight From the Ad Accounts

One screenshot per business line - spend, lead volume and cost per result exactly as they appear in the client’s ad accounts.

R1 Dispatch - dispatch services. 52 ad sets, 1,450 Facebook leads at $7.55 each on $10,951 of spend, 98,972 accounts reached. The largest and cheapest of the four lines.

R1 Transport - driver recruitment. 14 ad sets across 2 campaigns, 754 applications at $8.35 on $6,294 of spend. The Spanish-language set alone brought 249 of them at $9.34.

R1 Go - ELD and GPS devices. 6 ads, 332 leads at $7.17 on $2,380 of spend, frequency 2.65 - a broad audience that never got fatigued.

ELD Expert - ELD compliance services. 18 ad sets, 135 leads at $59.15 on $7,985 of spend, frequency 5.11. A narrow audience is what makes a lead expensive.

The Key Insight

Trucking looks like one market. It is not. The same company selling ELD devices, dispatch, jobs and compliance is really selling to four different people, and the moment you treat them as one audience the numbers go flat.

So the first decision was structural, not creative. Four business lines, four ad accounts, four budgets, four sets of creatives. That is what makes the results below comparable - and it is what exposed the real story in the data.

Three of the four lines came in between $7.17 and $8.35 per lead. Dispatch alone produced 1,450 leads at $7.55 across 52 ad sets. Driver recruitment produced 754 applications at $8.35, and the biggest single win there was a Spanish-language ad set: 249 applications at $9.34, an audience the English creatives never touched.

The fourth line, ELD Expert, came in at $59.15 per lead - seven times the others. Same team, same channel, same process. The difference was the audience: ELD compliance sells to a narrow, well-defined set of carriers. Frequency in that account ran at 5.11 against 2.65 in the device account, which is what a small audience looks like in a report. You can buy more leads there, but you pay a steep premium for each one.

That is the lesson worth taking from this case. The channel does not set the cost of a lead - the size and readiness of the audience does. When the audience is broad and the offer is concrete, $7 leads are normal in trucking. When the audience is a few thousand carriers, $59 is what the market charges, and the honest move is to budget for it rather than pretend an optimisation will fix it.

One caveat, the same one as every other case here: cheap leads are not results. Trucking leads go cold fast, and the accounts that performed were the ones where somebody called back the same day.

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