Hillsborough and Pinellas deserve two campaigns, not one campaign with two locations
Pooling both sides of the bay into a single campaign produces a blended cost that describes neither market and hides which one is actually paying you.
Separate campaigns give you separate budgets, separate bids and separate schedules. All three should differ, because the drive, the housing and the competition differ.
If you only run trucks on the Hillsborough side, the Pinellas campaign should not exist yet. Run it when you have crews staged over there, not when you have ambition over there.
Set location targeting to people present in the area, not people present or interested. Interest based targeting hands you searches from someone in Ohio researching a house they are buying near Safety Harbor, and the call quality falls off a cliff.
Keep Pasco separate again if you serve Wesley Chapel or Lutz. Growth areas behave differently from established ones, and averaging them into Hillsborough buries the difference.
The Howard Frankland turns a twenty mile radius into money you cannot service
A radius drawn in miles around a Tampa address includes half of Pinellas County, and none of that radius accounts for the fact that there are only a few ways across.
Replace the circle with a shape. Draw the polygon by hand around the areas you dispatch to, then check it against a normal weekday afternoon rather than an empty Sunday map.
The four o'clock version of your service area is smaller than the ten in the morning version. If you accept jobs that far out at all, they should be scheduled work rather than same day promises.
Exclude the zip codes you will always decline. Every click from an address you turn down costs twice, once in media and once in the review you are unlikely to get after saying no.
Location bid adjustments are the right tool for the middle cases. Bid up where a truck is already parked, bid down where the job is technically reachable and rarely profitable.
Bid by hour of the day the way a dispatcher thinks, not the way an office does
Ad schedules should follow crew availability and the crossing, not a nine to five block that has nothing to do with plumbing.
Build the schedule from your own booking data. Most service shops can see the hours when calls convert to same day work and the hours when they convert to tomorrow at best.
Late afternoon is the hour that punishes this metro specifically. A search that comes in from across the water at that time is a job you will probably not reach, so bid it accordingly or push it into a campaign that offers a next day slot instead.
After hours is a separate decision entirely. Bid it only if a human answers and a truck can actually roll. Paying premium click prices to route someone to voicemail is the most expensive thing in a plumbing account.
Weekends deserve their own numbers. Plenty of plumbing shops discover their best cost per booked job on a Saturday morning and their worst on a Sunday night.
Repipe and sewer lateral searches need their own campaign and a longer leash
Emergency work and replacement work close on different clocks, and judging them on the same cost per lead will make you switch off the profitable half.
Someone with a burst supply line converts in minutes. Someone in an older St. Petersburg house researching whether to repipe converts over weeks, after two estimates and a conversation with a spouse.
Split them at the campaign level so the slower one is not starved by a target that was set for the fast one. Give it its own landing page, its own extensions and its own conversion action.
Search terms tell you which is which. Words like now, emergency and burst behave nothing like whole house repipe cost, cast iron replacement or sewer line camera inspection.
The replacement side is also where remarketing earns its place in a plumbing account. Nobody remarkets a flooded kitchen. Plenty of people come back to a repipe estimate they were not ready for.
Sinkhole and settlement keywords are traffic worth refusing
West-central Florida generates a steady stream of searches about ground movement, and most of it is not plumbing work you can sell or should try to.
Build the negative list before the campaign goes live. Sinkhole claim, insurance claim, engineer report, structural inspection and similar phrases pull in people who need someone else entirely.
Keep the usual plumbing exclusions too: how to, DIY, parts, salary, jobs, apprentice, free, cheapest, and the brand names of supply retailers. Add home warranty terms if you do not accept that work.
Tenant language is worth a decision rather than a reflex. A renter searching at midnight has no authority to approve anything, but they may put a property manager on the phone the next morning. Decide which of those you want and set the account accordingly.
Review search terms weekly for the first month and then monthly. Negative lists in this trade are never finished, and the queries drift with the season and the news.
Average cost per booked job across the bay hides which county is paying you
A single blended number for a two county metro is an average of two businesses, and the weak one is always being subsidized by the strong one.
Track the outcome, not the contact. A lead is a phone ringing. A booked job is a line on the dispatch board, and only one of those pays for the media.
Import booked and completed jobs back into the ad platform where your systems allow it, and report cost per booked job by county, by campaign and by job type.
Pace the budget against crew capacity on each side of the water rather than against a monthly calendar. Spending evenly through a month when one crew is already full for the week just buys calls you will decline.
Slow weeks are when accounts get cut in the wrong place. With county level reporting you can cut the market that is not converting instead of trimming everything by ten percent and hoping.
Questions we actually get
- What should a Tampa plumbing company budget for paid search?
- There is no honest per market figure to quote, and anyone offering one has not seen your service area or your close rate. The way to size it is backward: what a booked job is worth to you, what share of leads your office books, and how many jobs a crew can absorb in a week. That gives a ceiling worth testing into rather than a number pulled from a blog post.
- Should we run Local Services Ads as well as search ads?
- They do different jobs and most plumbing accounts eventually run both. The screened placements sit above search results and are priced per lead, while search ads give you far more control over query, geography and schedule. If budget forces a choice, start where your booking process is strongest, since neither format rescues a phone nobody answers.
- Do we really need separate campaigns for Hillsborough and Pinellas?
- If you serve both, yes. They have different competition, different housing and different drive times, and only separate campaigns let you set separate budgets and schedules. If you serve only one, the answer is simpler: target that one and exclude the other rather than paying for clicks you will hand back.
- How do we know an ad actually produced a job and not just a call?
- Connect the outcome to the click. Use call tracking with a minimum duration threshold so quick wrong numbers do not count, code every call by outcome in your booking system, and import the booked jobs back into the ad platform where your tools support it. Reporting on leads alone will tell you a good story about a bad month.
- Is paid social worth anything for a plumbing company here?
- For emergency work, generally not, since nobody scrolls a feed with water on the floor. It has a narrower use for replacement work: repipes, water treatment and sewer replacement in older neighborhoods where the homeowner is not yet searching. Treat it as demand creation with a longer payback, and do not judge it against the same number as your emergency campaign.
