Morgul Marketing

    Buying plumbing calls in a metro split by parish and a lake

    Paid search sells plumbing work faster than anything else you can buy, and it wastes money faster too. The waste in this market has a particular shape. Radius targeting drawn from one yard spills across a parish line or a lake crossing you cannot service profitably. Foundation and subsidence searches look like plumbing searches and are not. Heavy rain moves demand in hours. Our argument is that a New Orleans plumbing account should be built around parish geography and job type together, priced at the booked job rather than the lead, and given enough reserve that a wet week does not empty it by Wednesday.

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    Orleans repair money and Northshore replacement money need separate pacing

    The two halves of this metro produce different jobs at different speeds, and one shared daily budget lets the faster half eat the slower one.

    Work in Orleans Parish skews toward repair and replacement in older housing. Calls arrive urgently, close quickly and often turn into larger jobs once a camera goes down the line. Work on the Northshore, in Mandeville, Covington and Slidell, skews newer and more planned. Both are good business. They do not behave the same in an auction.

    Run them as separate campaigns with separate budgets. Shared budgets are decided by whichever half spends first, which in practice means the urgent half consumes the money and the planned half never gets tested. You will conclude the Northshore does not work when what actually happened is that it never got funded.

    Jefferson Parish deserves its own line as well. Metairie and Kenner sit close enough to be swept up by a radius drawn from an Orleans yard, and close enough that the results get blended into an average that tells you nothing.

    Set the budgets from the dispatch board rather than from a spreadsheet. If you have two trucks that can reach St. Tammany on a given day, the St. Tammany budget should reflect two trucks.

    A heavy rain day rewrites the budget before lunch

    Drainage events move plumbing demand faster than any seasonal plan you wrote in January.

    When the streets take on water, calls about backups, slow drains and yard drainage arrive together. Search volume moves with the weather, and so does the auction, because every competitor with a credit card is bidding into the same hours.

    Hold reserve for it. An account that spends its full monthly allowance evenly has nothing left for the days that convert best. We would rather pace slightly under on ordinary weeks and keep a reserve that can be released the same morning.

    Set alerts you will actually see. Someone needs the ability to raise budgets and change ad copy from a phone, because the useful window is measured in hours and not in reporting cycles.

    Match the promise to the truck. If the board is already full, the honest move is to pull back spend rather than buy calls you will answer with an apology. Buying demand you cannot service costs twice: once for the click and again for the review.

    Subsidence and foundation searches look like plumbing searches and spend like them

    The negative keyword list is where most of the money is saved in a New Orleans plumbing account.

    Ground movement is an ordinary topic here, which means people search for it constantly. House settling, pier repair, foundation leveling, shoring and slab movement will all pull your ads in if you are broad matching anything about pipes under a house. Those clicks go to a different trade.

    Add the rest of the usual offenders, and check them monthly rather than at setup. Do it yourself guides, plumbing schools and apprenticeship listings, supply house and parts searches, salary searches, and anyone hunting the parish utility about a street side leak or a water bill.

    Utility confusion is worth its own pass. Searches aimed at Entergy about gas service or an outage will find a gas line ad if the match types are loose, and none of those people are buying a plumber.

    Renters are the harder case. A renter in a Treme or Marigny double is a real person with a real problem who cannot authorize work. Some of those calls turn into landlord relationships worth having, so rather than excluding them outright, decide deliberately, and script the call either way.

    Decide whether you cross to Algiers and the West Bank before you draw a radius

    A river crossing at the wrong hour turns a nearby address into a job you should not have bought.

    Algiers and the West Bank are close on a map and expensive in practice, because getting there means a crossing that behaves differently at different times of day. The same is true of the lake crossing to the Northshore. Radius targeting understands distance, not bridges.

    Make it a business decision first. If you will serve the West Bank all day, target it deliberately and bid it at what it is worth. If you will only serve it for a replacement job that justifies the drive, then it belongs in the campaign that sells replacements and nowhere else.

    Use location targeting by place, not only by radius, and check that your settings restrict to people in the area rather than people merely interested in it. The default behavior has bought a great many plumbers calls from out of state.

    Layer in a schedule. Bidding harder in the hours a crew can actually reach a crossing, and easing off in the hours they cannot, is a small change that shows up in the booked job number within weeks.

    Putting raised house in the ad copy filters out the caller you do not want

    Ad copy that names the work you actually do is a qualification step you get for free.

    Generic plumbing ads attract generic plumbing calls. Copy that names pier and beam access, cast iron and galvanized replacement, sewer lateral work and camera inspection attracts the person with that job and gently repels the person shopping a fifty dollar drain snake.

    Name the parish or the neighborhood in the headline where it fits. A Metairie homeowner who sees Metairie in the ad clicks at a higher rate and calls with more confidence, and it costs nothing to write.

    Match the landing page to the ad. Sending a lateral replacement click to a general services page is the most common leak we find in plumbing accounts, and it is also the cheapest one to fix.

    Keep call assets and hours honest. If after hours calls go to voicemail, either do not run then or say what happens when someone calls. An ad promising round the clock service that reaches a recording buys you a bad review at full price.

    The number to manage is cost per lateral sold, not cost per call

    A cost per lead figure averaged across drain calls and replacement work hides everything you need to decide.

    Two campaigns can produce identical cost per lead and completely different businesses. One fills the board with small repairs, the other produces a handful of quotes for replacement work. Only a booked job number split by job type shows the difference.

    Get outcomes back into the ad platform. Booked, quoted, declined and out of area should flow back from whatever you dispatch with, so bidding is trained on the jobs you want rather than on form fills. It takes setup work and it is the highest leverage thing in most accounts.

    Report by parish alongside job type. Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany rarely pay back at the same rate, and the metro average will keep you funding the weakest of the three.

    Give changes room to settle. Plumbing volume in one metro is thin enough that a week of data proves very little, and the temptation to react every Monday is the reason many accounts never accumulate a usable history.

    Questions we get

    Should we run Local Services Ads as well as search ads?
    They do different jobs. Local Services Ads sit above search results and are priced by lead, and they tend to bring urgent, small ticket calls. Search campaigns are where replacement work is bought, because you control the query and the landing page. Most shops end up running both and judging them separately rather than against one blended number.
    How should the budget be split across the parishes?
    Start from what you can dispatch rather than from population. Fund Orleans and Jefferson at whatever your trucks can actually cover, and give St. Tammany its own budget only if you cross the lake. After a few months of booked job data by parish you can move money toward whichever is paying back best.
    What is a reasonable cost per booked job for plumbing here?
    We will not quote you a number, and anyone who does before seeing your account is guessing. The figure depends on your job mix, your close rate on the phone and your average ticket. What matters is establishing your own baseline, splitting it by job type and parish, and then improving it.
    Do we need a separate campaign for emergency work?
    Usually yes. Emergency queries convert on speed and availability, and they should be paced and scheduled against the hours you can answer. Mixing them with planned replacement work means the urgent side spends the budget and the quoting side never gets a fair test.
    How much of the account is negative keywords?
    More than most owners expect. In this market the list has to cover foundation and subsidence work, utility and Entergy searches, do it yourself research, parts and job hunting, and whatever else the search terms report turns up. It is a monthly job, not a setup task, and it is generally the fastest way to lower cost per booked job.

    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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