Let's TalkLet's TalkThe click is bought in a panic and the job is won or lost in the next ninety seconds, mostly on the phone.
Give us read access to the account and a month of call recordings. We come back with missed and abandoned calls by hour, the search terms taking budget, how after-hours spend performs, and the three changes worth making first. Recorded walkthrough, no call required.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
Accounts are structured as "drain cleaning", "water heater repair", "repiping" because that is how a plumber describes the work. Homeowners type what is happening to them - water coming up in the shower, no hot water, smell of sewage. Symptom queries are cheaper because fewer competitors have mapped them, and most accounts are not bidding on them at all.
Emergency demand runs into the evening and weekend, converts at a high rate because fewer competitors answer, and is routinely paid for and left to voicemail. This is the single worst combination available in a plumbing account: premium click price, high intent, zero capture. Either the hours get resourced or the ads get paused in them.
Without maintained negatives, a plumbing account pays for people looking for a part number, a how-to video, a supply house or a job. They click, some of them call, and they occupy the conversion reporting. In most accounts we audit this is the largest recoverable line and it has not been reviewed since launch.
A repipe or a water heater replacement is a considered purchase worth many times a drain callout, and run in the same campaign it is measured against the callout's conversion rate and cost per lead. It always looks worse, so it always loses budget - which is how an account ends up efficiently buying the least profitable work available.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
In emergency trades the largest available gain is usually call capture rather than traffic, and an agency paid to manage media has every reason to skip that finding. Doubling a plumbing budget into a phone that is unanswered at 7pm is the most expensive mistake available in this category, and we would rather find it in the free audit.
Building a symptom keyword set takes real work and produces cheaper clicks than the obvious service terms everyone bids on. It is the kind of unglamorous mapping that does not show up in a monthly report as an achievement, and it is where the margin in a plumbing account tends to be.
If the evening demand is real and the capacity is not, the honest recommendation is to stop buying those clicks rather than to keep spending into voicemail. That reduces the managed budget, which is against our interest, and it is the right call.
Missed, abandoned, out-of-area, not-a-job, by hour. This is where the waste in a plumbing account actually lives.
Resource the hours or stop buying them. Both are defensible; paying and not answering is not.
Build the keyword set around what homeowners type rather than what the trade calls it, and bid where competitors are not.
Water heaters and repipes get their own campaigns, pages and targets so they stop being judged against callouts.
Phone-first, fast, answer time and service area visible. The visitor is standing in the problem.
Negatives, dayparting and pacing revisited every month, reconciled to invoiced work.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
For a homeowner with water spreading across a floor, a landing page is an obstacle. Call-only ads remove it entirely for the highest-urgency segment, and they are frequently absent from plumbing accounts that run the same landing-page funnel for every query regardless of urgency.
A failing heater produces days of research at a job value well above a callout, and it is routinely swept into the emergency campaign. Given comparison content, financing and its own page it behaves like the planned purchase it is - and it stops being measured against a same-hour conversion rate.
A job forty minutes out has different economics from one down the road, and a radius treats them identically. Layered geographic bidding lets you keep the distant work available without paying metropolitan prices to win it.
Commercial searches are fewer, more valuable and researched on a longer clock by a facilities buyer rather than a panicking homeowner. Left in the same campaigns they are judged on residential conversion speed and quietly defunded, which removes the steadier half of the business.
The nearest paid-search engagement we can point at is automotive rather than plumbing, and we are not going to present it as a trade case study. It is relevant because it is the same account shape: urgent high-volume queries sharing a budget with considered high-value ones, where the gain came from separating them and from fixing what happened after the click rather than from bidding harder.
Read the full case studyOnly if somebody answers. That traffic converts well precisely because fewer competitors are available, which makes it some of the best inventory in the trade - and paying for it while it goes to voicemail is the worst spend in the account. We would rather measure those hours, help you decide whether to resource them, and pause them if the answer is no.
They are what homeowners actually type: water under the sink, no hot water, sewage smell in the bathroom - rather than "drain cleaning" or "sewer line repair". Fewer competitors map them, so the clicks are cheaper, and the intent is often higher because the person is describing a live problem rather than researching a service category.
For the highest-urgency segment, usually yes. A landing page is an extra step for someone standing in water, and call-only removes it. It is not right for planned work like repipes or heater replacement, where the buyer wants to read before they ring - which is why these belong in separate campaigns rather than one blended setup.
Target by drive time rather than city or radius, bid the fringe as its own lower-value layer rather than including it silently, and state the service area on the page so callers self-select. What remains is a small enough number that you can decide deliberately whether it is worth taking.
Almost always because the account is efficiently buying the least valuable work. Drain callouts convert cheaply and often, so an undifferentiated account optimises toward them and away from the repipes and heater replacements that actually carry margin. Separating the two and setting different targets usually changes the picture within a month.
Not as a first move. It will find conversions, and in a trade full of cheap high-volume queries it tends to find the cheapest ones available unless the conversion definition and exclusions are right first. Get search structured, the negatives working and the conversion definition tied to booked work before handing budget to a campaign type that tells you less about where it went.
Written for owners weighing this up, whether or not they work with us.
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