Morgul Marketing

    What a Denver plumbing ad account should bid on, and what it should refuse

    Paid search buys attention, not revenue, and the gap between the two is where most plumbing accounts lose money. In this metro the gap has a shape. A radius drawn around a yard sends your truck west into the foothills and east across three county lines, and those drives do not bill the same. Outdoor water work compresses into two short seasons. Half the clicks in a broad plumbing account come from people who will never hire anyone. An account built for Denver separates money by jurisdiction and by job type, refuses traffic on purpose, and reports at the booked job rather than at the form fill.

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    Bid the city and county apart from Douglas and Jefferson, not with a slider

    Location bid adjustments average away the differences that decide profit here, and separate campaigns put them back on the table.

    Denver is a consolidated city and county. Douglas County, with Highlands Ranch, Parker and Castle Rock, is newer stock and a different job mix. Adams County, running through Thornton and Westminster, behaves differently again. Older central neighborhoods send service line and repipe work that a newer subdivision rarely does.

    Roll all of that into one campaign with location modifiers and you get a blended cost per click that tells you nothing and a budget that drifts to whichever geography clicks most, which is not the same as whichever geography pays most.

    Separate campaigns cost you data density and buy you control. Separate budgets, separate schedules, separate negatives, separate ad copy naming the places you actually serve.

    Start with two or three splits, not six. A shop dispatching from one yard usually cannot support a campaign per county without starving all of them.

    Spring startups and fall blowouts are two short auctions worth planning for

    Outdoor water work here arrives in narrow windows, and a flat monthly budget will sleep straight through both of them.

    Water conscious landscaping is mainstream across the metro rather than niche, so irrigation, backflow and outdoor shutoff conversations are normal household business. They also cluster into a few weeks at each end of the season.

    Hold reserve budget for those weeks instead of spreading spend evenly across twelve months. When the window opens, the clicks are relatively cheap and the intent is immediate.

    Price these jobs as acquisition, not as revenue. A blowout or a backflow test is a small ticket that puts your name in a phone before the heater fails or a line backs up.

    Set the campaign to lift and then step down again. Leaving it running at full budget in July spends money on nobody.

    Evaporative cooler line work is a summer keyword set the coasts never see

    A dry climate produces a small ad group that simply does not exist in a national plumbing account template.

    Evaporative coolers need a supply line, a shutoff and seasonal attention. Whole home humidifiers need a supply and a drain. In a metro this dry, both are ordinary work, and the search terms attached to them carry almost no competition from national advertisers.

    Build the ad group narrow and write the ad to the actual job. Generic plumbing copy will not convert a person searching for a cooler line leak.

    Volume will be modest. Modest volume at low cost with high intent is a better line in your account than another thousand impressions on a head term.

    Keep it separate so it can be paused and restarted with the season without disturbing anything else.

    Utility billing lookups and license checks are not plumbing customers

    Building the negative list is most of the work in a plumbing account, and skipping it is the most common way these budgets get burned.

    A broad plumbing account collects searches from people chasing an Xcel Energy billing question, looking up whether a contractor holds a license, pricing a trade school, or finding a supply house counter. None of them will book a truck.

    Add the do it yourself family, the home warranty family and the rental listing family. Renters searching for who to call in their building are usually not the person who pays the invoice.

    After a hail week the metro fills with out of town contractor traffic and homeowners researching storm damage. Watch your search terms in those weeks and cut what wanders in.

    Review the search term report weekly for the first month, then monthly. Negatives are maintenance, not a setup task you finish once.

    The foothills edge of your radius is where the day gets eaten

    A radius drawn on a map buys clicks in places your truck reaches at a cost you cannot recover.

    Twenty five miles west from a Lakewood yard and twenty five miles east are not the same trip. Terrain, roads and traffic decide the real service area, and the map circle does not know that.

    Trim the edges by drive time rather than distance. Golden and the foothills may earn a place in the account at a higher ticket threshold, or a separate campaign with its own ad copy about trip charges, or no place at all.

    The same test applies going south toward Castle Rock and north toward Broomfield. If a job there ties up a truck for most of a day, it needs to be worth most of a day.

    Say the coverage plainly in the ad. Filtering before the click is cheaper than filtering on the phone.

    Split cost per booked job by job type, or one tankless flatters everything

    An account average will hide a losing campaign behind a single large ticket, so report the number the way a dispatcher would.

    A call is not a booking. A booking is not a completed job. Feed dispatch outcomes back into the ad platform or into a spreadsheet, because the platform only knows what you tell it.

    Break cost per booked job out by job type. Drain work, water heater and tankless, sewer line, irrigation. One profitable heater month can carry a drain campaign that has been losing money since spring.

    Then break it out by county. The same cost per lead in Arapahoe and in Boulder County can mean two different businesses depending on close rate and drive time.

    Refuse any report that stops at cost per lead. It is the easiest number to produce and the least useful one you will be shown.

    Questions we get

    How much should a Denver plumbing company budget for Google Ads?
    It depends on how many trucks you can fill and what a booked job is worth to you. The useful starting question is capacity, not budget. Spending more than your dispatch board can absorb creates missed calls, which cost more than the clicks did.
    Should I run Local Services Ads as well as search ads?
    Many shops run both, since they reach the buyer at different moments and are priced differently. Treat them as separate lines in the account with separate expectations, and judge each on booked work rather than on total leads.
    Do I need separate campaigns for every county in the metro?
    No. Start with two or three splits where the job mix or drive time differs, such as the city and county versus the southern suburbs. Too many campaigns starve each other and slow down every optimization you try to make.
    What negative keywords matter most for plumbing here?
    Do it yourself terms, trade school and apprenticeship searches, supply house lookups, home warranty queries, license verification, and utility billing questions. Review your search terms weekly at first, because the list that matters is the one your own account produces.
    How do I know whether the ads are actually working?
    Track each inquiry to an outcome and report cost per booked job by job type and by county. If your reporting stops at cost per lead, you can be profitable and losing money at the same time and never see which.

    Rules that affect your marketing

    License numbers belong in advertising, as with the other trades. The more useful local variable is that water source, water chemistry and sewer versus septic service differ between neighboring municipalities, which changes which problems a plumber is actually called about and therefore what the page should be about.

    Written by KC Thompson, Morgul Marketing. Updated .

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