The complete guide to plumbing Google and Meta ads

Step by step

The playbook

1. 01

   Price each kind of plumbing job

   A booked night emergency, a hydro jetting job, a tankless install and a whole-house repipe are worth very different amounts. Know each one before you decide what you can pay to win it.

   • Pull average ticket and close rate for emergency, drain and sewer, water heater and repipe work
   • Note what your trip fee covers and how many night calls your on-call plumber can run
   • Set a target cost per booked job for each of the four
2. 02

   Run emergency and planned work apart

   Someone with sewage coming up a floor drain calls the first plumber who answers. Someone pricing a tankless heater reads three sites first. In one campaign, the panic clicks spend the money and the planned work never gets a fair run.

   • An emergency campaign for burst pipes, backups and no hot water
   • A drain and sewer campaign for clogs, camera inspections and jetting
   • Water heater and repipe campaigns with their own budgets
3. 03

   Run emergency ads on your on-call schedule

   Emergency plumbers typically charge well above their normal rate, and the homeowner pays it to whoever picks up. An ad that rings to voicemail at 2 a.m. pays for that call and hands it to the next company.

   • Run emergency ads only when a person answers and can dispatch
   • If nights go to an answering service, check whether those calls actually book
   • Pause weekend and holiday emergency ads when nobody is on call
   • Check every week which ad calls went unanswered, and when
4. 04

   Make the ad and the page answer the same problem

   The burst pipe caller wants to know you’ll come tonight and how pricing works. The water heater shopper wants options, warranty and financing. Send each to a page built around that question.

   • Say whether you come nights and weekends, and only if it’s true
   • Explain how your trip or diagnostic fee works in the ad or on the page
   • Land emergency clicks on a one-tap call page and water heater clicks on a tank and tankless page
5. 05

   Draw the map around drive time, day and night

   During the day several trucks cover the area. At night it may be one on-call plumber. A click from the far edge of the map costs the same and can tie that plumber up for hours.

   • Target people located in your area, and switch off the option that also reaches people searching about it
   • Use a tighter radius for night emergency ads
   • Bid more in the suburbs where you want water heater and repipe work
6. 06

   Cut DIY and parts searches every month

   Plumbing searches draw a lot of DIY traffic: how to unclog a drain, water heater for sale, PEX fittings, plumbing apprentice jobs. The search terms report shows which ones your ads paid for.

   • Read the search terms report monthly, weekly during a freeze
   • Block how-to, parts, equipment and job searches
   • Block free repair programs and city names your trucks don’t reach
7. 07

   Build freeze and storm campaigns ahead of time

   In freeze markets, burst pipe calls pile up the night the temperature drops. Heavy rain can bring a run of sewer backups. Campaigns built in the fall can go live by area the day the forecast turns, while you’re busy running calls.

   • Write frozen and burst pipe ads and a landing page in the fall
   • Have sewer backup ads ready for heavy rain forecasts
   • Switch them on by area, and raise budgets only if you have trucks to send
8. 08

   Use Meta for planned work

   Nobody with a backed-up sewer scrolls Facebook for a plumber. Meta works for reminding homeowners who looked at your water heater or repipe pages while they compare, and for fall offers like water heater flushes or pipe insulation in your service area.

   • Show water heater and repipe jobs to people who viewed those pages
   • Run fall offers like water heater flushes in your service area
   • Pause it if it isn’t adding booked jobs
9. 09

   Track every ad to the booked job, test, then improve

   To the ad platforms, a call about a dripping faucet and a call that became a sewer line replacement look the same until the jobs and invoices come back from your CRM. Send them back as they’re booked, and bidding learns which plumbing customers you want more of.

   • Count the booked job, by service line, as the conversion, with calls and quote requests tracked on the way there
   • Capture the click ID (gclid, the code Google adds to an ad click) with every form and online booking, and send booked jobs and invoice totals back to Google and Meta as they’re booked
   • Judge keywords and campaigns on cost per booked job, by service line
   • Test one change at a time, like an ad, a landing page, an offer or a bid, and keep what books more