How to tell if your plumbing marketing is actually working

The four numbers that matter

The metrics designed to make you feel good

None of these are fake. They are all real measurements of something. The problem is that they can all improve in a month where you booked less work.

• Impressions. How many times your ad appeared. Doubles if you widen your service area, which also makes everything worse.
• Clicks. Goes up when you attract more of the wrong people. Junk calls are clicks.
• Click-through rate. Improves if you write a vaguer ad that appeals to more people, most of whom will not hire you.
• Cost per lead. Improves if you count more things as leads. Ask what counts. If a hang-up counts, the number means nothing.
• 'Leads'. The most abused word in the industry. A lead can be a booked job or a wrong number depending on who is writing the report.

A monthly report full of impressions and clicks is not a report on your business. It is a report on the advertising, written by the person being judged.

Why almost nobody has these numbers

Two reasons, and both are fixable.

First, the ads point at the main business line, so ad calls and referral calls and repeat customers all arrive on the same phone and become indistinguishable. Without a tracked number there is no honest attribution — only guessing dressed up as reporting.

Second, nobody closes the loop. Even with call tracking, somebody has to mark which calls turned into work. That takes about thirty seconds a call and it is the difference between knowing your cost per booked job and estimating it. It is also the step almost every shop skips, which is why almost every shop argues about whether marketing works instead of measuring it.

Five questions for whoever runs your ads

• What did a booked job cost me last month? Silence or deflection here is the whole answer.
• What specifically did you change on my account in the last 30 days? A real answer names keywords, negatives, bids, budgets. 'Ongoing optimization' means nobody logged in.
• How many of my calls were junk, and what did you do about it? If they don't know, they aren't listening to calls or reading search terms.
• What is my worst-performing campaign and why is it still running? Every account has one. A good manager already knows and has a reason.
• Whose name is on the Google Ads account? Covered in its own guide, but ask it here too.

A reasonable timeline

Days one to fourteen: calls start, but the bidding is still learning. Judging anything here is judging noise.

Weeks three and four: enough conversion data to see cost per lead settling. Negative keywords should be actively going in. First honest look at cost per booked job.

Months two and three: cost per booked job should be trending down as the negatives accumulate and the bidding sharpens. If it is flat or rising by month three with no explanation, something is wrong and 'give it more time' is not the answer.

One more thing, said plainly: if the only number anyone can show you after ninety days is impressions, you did not buy advertising management. You bought a monthly report.

Common questions

Related

• Who owns your Google Ads account — and why it matters more than the feeIf your marketing company owns your Google Ads account, you lose your conversion history, keyword lists and optimization data the day you leave. How to check, and how to fix it.
• What should a plumber pay a marketing agency?Agency fee models explained for home-service owners: percentage of spend versus flat fee, what's normal in 2026, and the four questions that tell you whether you're being taken.
• Why your plumbing ads generate junk calls (and how to stop it)Wrong numbers, tire-kickers, out-of-area calls and telemarketers eating your ad budget — the specific causes, and the fixes, in the order that recovers the most money.