So far this guide's plumbing account has been built around one moment: the homeowner who grabs a phone and types "plumber near me" or "water heater leaking." For most plumbing work that moment is the whole game, and Search owns it. Nobody browses YouTube for a plumber while water is pouring through the ceiling.
But not every plumbing job starts with a flood. Some start with a sewer camera report, a water heater that's 14 years old and making noises, or a quote for a whole-house repipe that the homeowner isn't sure about. Those people are thinking about a plumbing job for days or weeks before they call anyone. Demand Gen is Google's campaign type for that stretch of deciding, and most plumbing accounts aren't ready for it as early as Google would like. This chapter shows why, and what to do when they are.
Google Already Keeps a "Plumbing Services" Shopper List. Demand Gen Can Show Your Video to It.
Google sorts people into audience segments based on what they've been searching for, watching and reading. One of the segments in its audience list is an in-market segment called "Plumbing Services," for people Google judges to be actively shopping for a plumber. We pulled the segment list from the Google Ads API, and "Plumbing Services" is available to both Search and Demand Gen campaigns. A related segment, "Plumbing Fixtures," covers people shopping for faucets, toilets and the like.
Demand Gen is how a plumbing company puts an ad in front of that segment without waiting for a search. The ads run in places people browse rather than search: YouTube videos and Shorts, the Discover feed on Android phones, Gmail's promotions tab, Google Maps, and the websites that rent space to Google's display ads, according to Google's own description. Google also lists its video partners, outside apps and sites that carry YouTube-style video ads, as an available surface. For a plumber, the important one is YouTube: it's where a homeowner watching a video about water heater lifespans can see your technician explaining one.
There are three ways to tell Demand Gen who to reach:
- Predefined segments Google already built, like "Plumbing Services."
- Custom segments you build from search terms, websites and apps that describe your customer.
- Lookalike segments Google builds to resemble a group you give it. Google says the starting group can be people who made a past purchase, visited your website or watched videos on your YouTube channel. For a plumber, that's usually the customer list from the field software.
The rest of this chapter is about using those segments for the plumbing jobs where they make sense, and the budget it takes to do it.
Nobody Shops Around for a Burst Pipe. Homeowners Shop for Sewer Lines, Water Heaters and Repipes.
Look at what homeowners talk through before they hire a plumber and a pattern shows up. We read 54 Reddit threads started by homeowners asking about plumbing, from our example market and beyond. The jobs they were weighing:
- Sewer line or main drain work: 12 threads
- Tank water heaters: 11 threads
- Repipes: 6 threads
And 28 of the 54 asked whether a quote was fair or what the job should cost. One caveat: we searched Reddit specifically for some of these jobs, so the counts partly reflect where we looked. But the same lean shows up when you compare sources. Sewer lines come up in 47 Reddit homeowner posts against 17 mentions in 794 Google reviews; repipes in 39 Reddit posts against 8 reviews. Homeowners talk through the big planned jobs before they hire. They review the plumber after. Nobody posts "is this burst pipe quote fair?" while standing in water. They post it about the sewer line replacement, the water heater that might last another year, the repipe the last plumber recommended.
The search volumes say the same thing. In the US, "water heater replacement cost" draws 40,500 searches a month, "how long do water heaters last" 18,100, "tankless vs tank water heater" 9,900 and "sewer line replacement cost" 4,400. Those aren't emergencies. They're homeowners doing homework.
Our example market adds a local version. The city's water utility, SAWS, is named in 10 reviews in our sample, and in most of them it's what set the plumbing job in motion: "receiving letters from SAWS warning of a constant leak," as one put it, or "SAWS had sent an alert." A letter about a hidden leak doesn't flood the kitchen. It gives the homeowner days to pick a leak detection company, which is a decision Demand Gen can show up for. Your market's utility may send similar notices; it's worth asking what they say and when they go out.
That's the split that decides where Demand Gen belongs. Emergencies (a burst pipe, an active leak, no water) go to Search, with the bids and ad groups from Chapters 6 and 7. Planned jobs have a window of days or weeks where the homeowner is reading, comparing and asking strangers. A short video of your crew replacing a sewer line, shown to someone Google sees shopping for plumbing services, puts your company's name in that window before the homeowner types anything.
Google Asks for a Daily Budget of 10 Times the Target. A $120 Booked Job Means $1,200 a Day.
Here's the part that keeps most small plumbing shops out of Demand Gen, at least for now. Google puts a number on it. A Demand Gen campaign bidding toward a cost per acquisition should get a daily budget of ten times that cost or more, Google recommends.
Run the numbers with the worked example from Chapter 7, a $120 cost per booked job from Isolation. Ten times that is $1,200 a day. For a shop spending a few thousand dollars a month on Search, that's not a test budget; it's the whole year's budget in a quarter.
Google ties that advice to campaigns bidding toward a target cost per acquisition, and Demand Gen can run without one. But the advice is the clearest signal Google gives of how much conversion data the campaign needs, and it applies either way. The rule exists because Demand Gen learns from conversions the same way Performance Max does, and it needs enough of them, fast enough, to learn which viewers turn into booked jobs. A budget that covers one or two conversions a day leaves the campaign guessing for weeks.
If the budget isn't there yet, the planned-job audience isn't lost. Performance Max, from Chapter 10, already serves video on YouTube, and the same planned-job video can run there first. Search can also pick up the homework searches directly: a "water heater replacement" ad group with a cost guide on its landing page meets the homeowner at the exact moment of research, for the price of a click.
So Demand Gen comes last in the plumbing build order. Search runs first and proves what a job costs. Performance Max comes next, once Search clears 30 conversions a month. Demand Gen waits until both are working and the budget can carry ten booked jobs' worth of spend every day. For a multi-truck shop with a sewer and repipe crew, that day comes. For a two-truck shop, it may not, and that's the right answer for that shop.
A Demand Gen Ad Is a Video Before It's a Headline
Demand Gen runs where people are watching and scrolling: YouTube, Shorts, Discover, Gmail. Google lets you run image-only or video-only campaigns, but notes that using both typically performs better, and on YouTube the video is the ad. A headline under a stock photo of a smiling plumber gets scrolled past in a feed full of video.
The video doesn't need a production company. It needs to show the work homeowners are weighing:
- A sewer camera screen with your technician pointing out the root intrusion or the belly in the line.
- An old water heater coming out and the new one going in, with one sentence about what the homeowner should expect.
- A repipe in progress, with the old galvanized line next to the new PEX.
A simple structure works for all three:
- The first five seconds show the problem, not the logo: the cracked line on the camera screen, the rust stain at the base of the tank.
- The middle explains it in one breath, the way the technician would explain it standing in the homeowner's kitchen.
- The end says what happens next: a camera inspection, a written quote before any work, the phone number.
Thirty seconds on a phone, at a real job, with a technician who can explain what they're looking at, is the kind of video that earns a homeowner's attention in a feed. It's also the same video that serves Performance Max in Chapter 10.
Then build the audience around the planned jobs:
- Start with "Plumbing Services," Google's in-market segment.
- Add a custom segment built from the searches homeowners make while they're deciding: "sewer line replacement cost," "repipe cost," "tankless vs tank water heater." Google's help page says custom segments can be built from keywords, URLs and apps, so competitor websites belong in it too.
- Add a lookalike segment if you have a customer list to base it on. Check the list's size in Google Ads before counting on it; a short list gives Google little to model.
Measure Demand Gen on the same booked jobs as everything else. It will rarely look as efficient as Search, because it reaches people earlier, and some of what it starts finishes later through a branded search. That's expected. What matters is whether the planned-job pipeline grows.
When a plumbing company's Search account is booking steadily and the budget can carry it, our Google Ads management team adds Demand Gen on top, with the video and segments built from that account's own booked jobs.
Next: Three of the Nine Plumbers Who Held Google's Map Pack Ran Search Ads We Could Find
Most homeowners never scroll past the map. Chapter 12 covers the map pack and Local Services Ads: who held the map in our example market, what Local Services costs, and how both fit alongside a Search account.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Plumbers, our sixteen-chapter guide for plumbing companies anywhere in the US.
