Client Snapshot

A full-service plumbing company handling both emergency callouts and scheduled installation work in a competitive urban market, where multiple established plumbing companies were competing for high-intent customer searches.

The Challenge

Plumbing is one of the most competitive categories in local service advertising, with high costs on many of the core search terms.

The account needed a structure that could better prioritize customers searching for urgent plumbing services while still supporting scheduled work such as installations, repairs, and maintenance.

Another challenge was controlling wasted spend from searches with limited commercial intent. For a plumbing business, not every click represents someone ready to hire a professional. Searches driven by DIY research, general information, or product-related intent can quickly consume budget without generating a customer call.

The goal was to build a campaign structure that focused more heavily on real customer intent, valuable conversions, and efficient use of the advertising budget.

The Strategy

We restructured the campaign around different plumbing services and levels of customer intent, giving greater attention to searches associated with immediate service needs.

Emergency-focused searches were separated from scheduled and planned plumbing services so the account could better allocate budget according to urgency and customer intent.

We also refined the keyword strategy by reviewing search-term data and identifying searches that were unlikely to generate qualified plumbing leads.

A comprehensive negative keyword strategy was used to reduce irrelevant traffic, including DIY, informational, employment-related, and plumbing-supply searches.

Ad messaging was also refined to make the client’s offer clearer and more relevant to customers actively looking for plumbing services.

Throughout the campaign, performance was continuously monitored and optimized based on clicks, conversions, search terms, and cost efficiency.

The Results

Campaign Period: March 1 – August 31, 2026

Over the six-month campaign period, the account generated 648 conversions from 4.26K clicks, with an average cost of $55.50 per conversion on approximately $36K in advertising spend.

Why It Worked

The campaign was built around a simple principle: not every plumbing search has the same commercial value.

By organizing the account around service intent, filtering out irrelevant searches, improving ad relevance, and continuously optimizing based on actual conversion data, the campaign was able to focus the advertising budget on searches more closely aligned with the client’s services.

Rather than optimizing purely for clicks, the focus remained on generating meaningful customer actions and making the available budget work more efficiently.

Takeaway for Similar Businesses

For plumbing businesses, campaign structure can have a major impact on how efficiently an advertising budget is used.

Separating different service intents, controlling irrelevant search traffic, and optimizing around conversions can help create a campaign that is better aligned with how customers actually search for plumbing services.

The objective isn’t simply to generate more traffic.

It’s to turn the right searches into valuable customer actions.