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How to target truck & bus drivers in Google Ads search campaigns?
Posted by on September 25, 2025 at 8:51 pmI’m running Google Ads for a roadside assistance service in Poland (focus on TIR, buses, delivery vans).
I want to reach mostly professional drivers (truck drivers, bus drivers) – not regular car users.
Problem: In Search campaigns, I can’t select Custom Segments – they only work in Display, Discovery, and PMax.
My current approach:
- Using keywords like "pomoc drogowa tir" (truck roadside assistance), "laweta tir", "holowanie busów"
- Adding negative keywords to exclude passenger car searches
- Geo-targeting near highways and logistic hubs
But I wonder if anyone has more advanced strategies to filter traffic to only professional drivers.
Has anyone tried:
- Combining Search with Performance Max just for audience targeting?
- Using Observation + Bid Adjustments for In-Market segments (Commercial Vehicles)?
- Other hacks to narrow Search campaigns to truck/bus drivers?
Any tips from people doing similar campaigns would be great!
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1 Reply
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Your best case is to go with your current approach as well as testing for those observation and bid adjustments. There is no sure fire way to make sure that you are *just* targeting truck drivers but with enoug negative search terms and the right targeting you can make sure that you’re targeting the largest pool of truck drivers.
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1) Keywords that have the “truck” modifier as you’re doing
2) Ad copy that Clearly States for Trucks only “Is your Truck StUcK??” “Professional Truck Towing for heavy equipment” etc
3) Landing Pages – pictures of trucks
4) Forms – Q 1: Is this for a truck or vehicle?Audience targeting is more suggestive than empirical in GAds based on websites they browse
Advertise on competitor names of similar companies
Native polish speaker btw if you need help…
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On Search you can’t directly target truck or bus drivers, so the best approach is keyword sculpting (e.g. “pomoc drogowa tir”, “holowanie busów”) with strong negatives to block passenger car intent, plus geo-targeting highways and travel hubs…depots, stations…etc…
Layer in-market and affinity audiences in Observation mode, and optionally use PMax to build driver-focused audiences for remarketing back into Search.
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Use truck/bus-only keywords, add car negatives, target highways/logistics hubs, and layer commercial vehicle audiences.
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Put all the **car** related terms to the negative keyword list. Also, clearly mention your bus & truck related keywords in the first pinned headline & description as a way to qualify traffic.
Stick to search until you can make it work for you & think about P max when you do gather 100+ conversions in the search campaign
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