Morgul Marketing

    What a plumbing ad account has to know about the Ohio River

    Paid search is the fastest way for a Louisville plumbing company to buy work, and the fastest way to buy work it cannot do. The metro crosses a state line, so a plain radius around your yard will spend money in Indiana whether or not you are licensed there. Winter runs for months, not for one bad weekend, which changes how a budget should be paced. And the honest measure of an account is not cost per lead. It is what a booked job costs after the tire kickers, the wrong county calls and the estimates that never closed are all counted. This page lays out how we would build and grade that account.

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    Your license, not your drive time, sets the edge of the campaign

    The first decision in a Louisville plumbing account is which state the ads are allowed to run in, and it is a legal question before it is a marketing one.

    Set location targeting to people physically present in your service area, not to people interested in it. The looser setting is the default in some accounts and it buys clicks from anywhere.

    If you are licensed in Kentucky only, the Indiana side is not an upside to test. Exclude Clark and Floyd counties, and add the city names as negative keywords too, because someone sitting in Louisville will search for a plumber in Jeffersonville for a rental they own.

    If you are licensed on both sides, run them as separate campaigns with separate budgets and separate landing pages. Southern Indiana searchers respond to being named. A campaign that says New Albany and Clarksville out loud does better than one that says Louisville and hopes.

    Requirements for licensing and registration differ between the two states and are worth confirming with your own counsel before a dollar of budget crosses the river.

    Draw the Kentucky side against the Watterson and the Gene Snyder, not a circle

    A radius treats every direction as equal, and the drive from your yard to Prospect at four in the afternoon is nothing like the drive to Okolona.

    Build the target as a list of cities and counties you would actually dispatch to, then adjust from there. Inside the Watterson the trips are short and a small ticket can still pay. Out past the Gene Snyder into Oldham or Bullitt County the same call carries an hour of windshield time.

    Bid accordingly. Higher inside the ring where you can run three calls in the time one outer call takes, lower or off in the outer areas for small jobs, and open for the planned work that justifies the drive.

    Watch the search terms report for river crossings you did not intend to buy. Bridge traffic makes a twelve mile straight line meaningless for response times.

    Some shops solve this by only taking outer county work on scheduled days. If that is you, run those areas on their own ad schedule rather than pretending you are always available.

    Three campaigns your plumbing account probably needs: right now, this week, and this spring

    Structure by how fast the customer has to decide, because the ad, the landing page and the conversion definition all change.

    Right now is burst pipes, no water, sewer backups, no hot water in February. Tight keyword lists, phone focused ads, a page that gives an arrival window and a number. The conversion is a call answered by a human.

    This week is water heaters, drain clearing, leaking fixtures, garbage disposals. The buyer will shop two or three shops. Ads can carry a price band and a booking link, and the landing page should let people schedule without talking.

    This spring is repipes, sewer line replacement, tankless conversions and water treatment. Broader keywords, longer forms, more reading. The conversion is a booked estimate, and the close comes weeks later.

    Keep them apart on budget. If they share, the cheap emergency clicks will eat the money you meant for the jobs with margin, and the report will look fine while the schedule board fills with small work.

    Bill disputes, thaw videos and permit lookups are the January clicks that eat a month

    Cold weather multiplies search volume and multiplies the junk inside it, so the negative list gets more attention in winter than in any other season.

    When a cold snap hits, people search for how to thaw a frozen pipe before they search for a plumber. That traffic converts poorly and it is cheap to exclude. Watch for how to, DIY, video, tutorial and step by step.

    Utility and administrative searches are the other drain. Bill questions, service transfers, meter and permit lookups, and people trying to reach LG&E rather than a contractor. None of them are your customer.

    Pull the search terms report weekly through heating season, not monthly. A bad week in January can spend more than a slow month in September, and by the time the monthly report lands the money is gone.

    Landlord and tenant language deserves a decision rather than a reflex. Some shops want property manager work in Old Louisville and the Highlands. Others lose money on it. Pick, then write the negatives to match.

    Bid the overnight hours only if the phone gets answered at three

    Louisville's logistics and air freight base means people are awake and searching at hours that would be dead in another metro, and that is only an opportunity if you pick up.

    Overnight clicks are often genuine emergencies and they can be worth real money. They are also worth nothing if they land in a voicemail box while a competitor with an answering service takes the job.

    Match the ad schedule to your actual coverage, hour by hour. If you truly run nights, say so in the ad copy and bid up. If you do not, turn it off and put the money where it will be answered.

    Early morning has its own pattern here. Someone finishing a shift at five in the morning has time to deal with a problem before sleeping, which is not how a nine to five household behaves.

    Track answer rate by hour alongside cost per call. It is common to find one or two hours in the schedule that look cheap and perform terribly, purely because nobody was there.

    Put a dollar figure on the calls you refuse, or the account grades better than it works

    Cost per booked job only means something once the wrong county calls, the price shoppers and the jobs you turned down are counted as spend.

    Tag every inquiry with an outcome. Booked, quoted, refused as out of area, refused as wrong service, no answer, price only. Feed those tags back against the campaign that produced them.

    Two campaigns can post the same cost per lead and be nothing alike. One books seven jobs in ten, the other books two and hands you eight conversations you did not want. Averaging them hides the difference until the account looks tired and nobody knows why.

    Split the report by state and by county. Kentucky and Indiana calls do not cost the same to serve, and Bullitt County drive time is real money that never appears in an ads dashboard.

    Planned work needs a longer window before you judge it. A sewer replacement estimate can sit for weeks. Grade emergency campaigns weekly and planned campaigns by the season, or you will switch off the line with the best margin.

    Questions we get

    Should we run Local Services Ads, search ads, or both?
    Most plumbing shops here end up with both, doing different jobs. The Local Services placement tends to pick up urgent, close-to-you calls. Search ads let you control geography precisely, which matters a great deal when a state line runs through your market, and let you build campaigns for planned work like repipes and sewer replacement that the emergency placements will not deliver.
    What should a Louisville plumbing account cost per month?
    There is no honest single number, and we will not make one up. It depends on your service radius, how many of your services you want to advertise, whether you are running both states and how competitive the terms you want are in a given week. What we can do is set a floor below which a campaign cannot gather enough data to be managed, then build up from there.
    Can you promise a cost per lead?
    No, and a promise like that usually means someone is about to buy you cheap clicks. We will commit to a structure, a negative keyword process, weekly search term reviews through winter and a report that shows cost per booked job with refused calls counted. If the number is bad, you will see it from us before you feel it on the schedule board.
    Do we need separate landing pages, or can ads point at the homepage?
    Separate pages, in almost every case. An emergency ad should land on a page with an arrival window and a phone number at the top. A tankless ad should land on a page that explains venting, gas supply and what changes in an older basement. Sending both to a homepage forces the visitor to do work they will not do.
    How do we handle the Indiana side if we are licensed there?
    Run it as its own campaign with its own budget, ad copy that names Jeffersonville, New Albany and Clarksville, and a landing page that speaks to Clark and Floyd county homeowners. Report it separately too. Once the two sides are averaged together, you lose the ability to see which one is actually paying for itself.

    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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