Guide / Paid Media
Paid media for maritime companies: the definitive guide
Most maritime paid accounts waste 30% to 50% of budget on irrelevant clicks. The fix is account discipline, not bigger spend.
Most maritime paid-media accounts have three problems: they target too broadly, they measure on last-click and they don’t have the negative-keyword hygiene to keep off-target searchers out of the auction. Fix those three and you can usually cut spend by a third while increasing qualified pipeline.
The auction-up rebuild
We rebuild every account in the same order:
Match-type discipline. Default to phrase and exact, not broad. Broad-match in maritime is where budget goes to die; the algorithm will happily spend your money showing your ad to “free shipping container” searchers and off-target academic queries.
Search-term mining, weekly. Pull every term that triggered an ad in the last seven days, mark anything that looks irrelevant as a negative and add them to the relevant ad-group’s negative list. Within four to six weeks the cost-per-qualified-lead curve breaks downward and stays there.
Segmentation by buyer-journey stage. Don’t run the same campaign for “container shipping” (informational, mostly off-target searchers) and “container shipping rates Felixstowe to Hamburg” (commercial, mostly logistics buyers). Different intent deserves different campaigns, different bids and different landing pages.
Conversion events that mean something. A “page view” isn’t a conversion. A “form fill” isn’t a conversion until the SDR has confirmed it’s a real prospect. Push qualified leads back into Google and LinkedIn as offline conversions so the bidder optimises toward revenue, not vanity volume.
Channel-by-channel
Google Ads. High-intent search where shortlists get formed. Tight account structure (one ad-group per genuine search intent), exact-match preference, conversion-led bidding only after you have ninety days of qualified-lead conversion data.
LinkedIn Ads. Job title, seniority, company size and industry targeting. Run sponsored content for thought leadership and lead-gen, message ads sparingly and document ads (gated PDFs) for high-value content. Account-based campaigns where deal value justifies the higher CPM (typically £30k+ ACV).
Microsoft Ads. Often overlooked. Microsoft’s audience skews older, Edge/Bing-using and more enterprise-leaning than Google’s. For a maritime audience that maps closely; we routinely see Microsoft outperform Google on a CPL basis for B2B maritime clients.
Meta (Facebook/Instagram). Used selectively. Brand campaigns and demand-generation creative against custom audiences and lookalikes. Not every maritime company belongs on Meta; we’ll tell you when it doesn’t fit.
YouTube and display. Brand presence and category education. Programmatic display where it complements other channels rather than padding spend.
What’s worth measuring
For maritime paid accounts:
- Cost per qualified lead (not cost per lead)
- Cost per opportunity (sales-team-confirmed)
- Pipeline value attributed to paid (multi-touch, not last-click)
- Closed-won revenue traced through CRM, by channel
- Negative keyword growth rate (proxy for account discipline)
We report monthly with directional read; the strategic conversation happens quarterly when the data is meaningful.
Where to start
If you’re running paid yourself or with another agency, three questions are diagnostic:
- What proportion of your spend last quarter went to broad-match keywords?
- How many search terms have you added to negatives in the last 30 days?
- Are sales-qualified leads pushed back to ad platforms as offline conversions?
If the answers are “most”, “almost none” and “no”, you’re paying full retail for traffic that won’t convert.
We rebuild maritime paid accounts on this kind of programme regularly. Get in touch if you’d like an audit on yours.
Frequently asked questions
What's a sensible monthly paid budget for a maritime company?
Should we run LinkedIn or Google?
How do you measure paid media in a six to eighteen month sales cycle?
Last updated 3 May 2026
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