A 2 AM burst pipe and a planned water heater quote both show up as “plumbing leads.” They do not buy the same way.
Decide which plumbing job you want more of first, then pick the channel. Emergency calls, drain work, water heaters, and big-ticket jobs (including commercial work for property and facilities managers) do not buy the same way, so one blended campaign and one lead count hide which spend pays.
Ostmen runs plumbing accounts for residential and commercial shops. We usually split campaigns by job type, and every account is fitted to that shop’s crews, hours, and margins. Use the tree to skip to the job you care about.
Burst pipe, no water, sewage backup. The buyer is on a phone, deciding in minutes, and calling the first credible plumber who answers.
Local Services Ads and call-focused Google Ads with tight hours and a tight service area. Plumbing is in phase 1 of Local Services Ads moving into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, which began in August 2026 for select U.S. home and storefront service advertisers. Google emails the account 14 days before the transition, and LSA performance reports do not transfer, so screenshot them first (Google Ads Help). Our LSA migration prep covers transition day. A missed call during your Google Business Profile hours can count as a billable lead when the caller stays on more than 20 seconds, voicemail included (Google, How leads work), so the hours in your profile must be hours someone answers. Google no longer credits leads for job types or areas you do not serve (Google, About automated lead credits), so turn on only the emergency work you actually run.
Booked emergency jobs from the CRM, so Google stops valuing a price-shopper call the same as a dispatched truck.
After-hours ads with nobody answering. You pay for the ring, and the next plumber gets the job.
Clogs, camera inspections, jetting. The buyer often searches the symptom, not the service name, and a simple clear can turn into a camera visit and a line repair.
Search ads on specific service terms (drain cleaning separate from sewer line work) plus SEO service pages that say what happens on the first visit and how line repair is quoted. Local Services Ads job types for drains help when the category matches the work you take.
Which drain calls turned into camera or sewer line work. Count cleanings and upsold line jobs on separate lines so bidding can tell them apart.
Optimizing to the cheapest clog calls. The board fills with low-margin clears while the camera and line work that pay for the truck never get enough budget.
No hot water today, or a tank the owner already knows is old. Repair and replace are different searches and different margins, and buyers compare tank versus tankless.
Search ads split repair versus replace. An SEO page that answers replacement questions (options, install timing, how the price is given). AI answers matter here too, because comparison questions get asked to assistants.
Sold replacements separate from repairs. A repair call that becomes an install quote should not sit in the same conversion as a same-day element swap.
One conversion for both. Google then treats a $180 repair call like a $2,000 install, and the campaign drifts toward whichever is easier to book.
Repipe, remodel rough-in, water treatment, and commercial work. The decision takes longer, and the buyer reads reviews, project photos, and paperwork before they call.
SEO, reviews, and remarketing for residential repipe and remodel shoppers. For commercial, lead with the jobs that repeat: drain jetting, grease line maintenance, and backflow testing. The caller is usually a property manager or facilities manager, not a homeowner. They need after-hours response terms, certificates of insurance without a chase, and invoices their office can pay. Give those searches their own campaigns and pages. Do not share a residential landing page with a facilities manager.
Sold estimates for residential big-ticket work. For commercial, report those jobs on their own line: first jobs booked, and whether the account came back for scheduled jetting, grease line, or backflow work. Never blend commercial booked jobs into the residential emergency or drain counts.
Running commercial terms inside a residential campaign, or judging a facilities account by a single call instead of by repeat scheduled work. The first job is the start of the relationship, not the whole result.
Homeowners researching a repipe and managers vetting a commercial plumber now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google’s AI Overviews for names. Answers are not stable. In a Leolens study collected October 3 to 5, 2026, when the same assistant was asked the same plumber question three times, its lists agreed only 22 out of 100 in the middle market, the lowest of the five services tested (Leolens, October 2026). One answer is a sample, not the answer.
In that study, plumber answers often cited ConsumerAffairs, Angi, and Thumbtack. Check that those listings match your name, address, and phone. Then make sure the AI knows which business you are: ask an assistant to describe your company by name and check the trade, city, and phone that come back. The method is in how to measure AI search visibility. Judge AI visibility on calls and booked jobs, not mention counts. See AI search visibility for local service businesses.
We send booked jobs back from your CRM, ServiceTitan or Housecall Pro, into Google Ads, so bidding learns which calls became paid work, and we report each branch on its own line. We used the same booked-job approach in a roofing Google Ads account. The split above is how we usually set plumbing up. Your shop may drop a branch, merge two, or weight commercial harder. The point is to decide the lines before the spend, then judge each line on booked jobs.
Plumbing is in phase 1 of Local Services Ads moving into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, which began in August 2026 for select U.S. home and storefront service advertisers. Google emails the account 14 days before the transition. LSA performance reports do not transfer, so screenshot them first (Google Ads Help).
Yes, during your Google Business Profile hours. A missed call can count as a billable lead when the caller stays on the line more than 20 seconds, voicemail included (Google, How leads work). Keep profile hours matched to hours someone answers.
No. An emergency caller wants someone now. A water heater shopper compares repair versus replace. One blended campaign lets the cheaper calls soak the budget. Split them, send each job type back from the CRM on its own line, and judge each on booked jobs.
We are a Google Partner agency. Book a strategy call. Tell us which plumbing job you want more of, and we will map the channel, the tracking, and the CRM link for it.
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