A homeowner searches "water heater repair," taps an ad that promises a $99 diagnostic, and lands on a home page with a rotating banner about air conditioning tune-ups. She scrolls once, finds no water heater and no $99, and goes back to the results. You paid for that click. The next plumber on the page gets the call.
Most plumbing owners think of where their ad shows up as a bidding contest. It is partly that. Google also scores the ad itself and the page behind it, fresh, on every single search. This chapter covers how the grade works and the cheapest way to raise it: build the account so that every plumbing search meets an ad and a page about the exact job the person typed.
Outbidding the Plumber Above You Doesn't Guarantee the Higher Spot. Google Weighs Five Other Things.
Google decides the order of ads on a results page with a score it calls Ad Rank. Its help page lists six inputs, and they translate to a plumbing shop like this:
- Your bid. Your ceiling per click. The actual charge often lands below it.
- Ad quality plus page quality. How well the ad and the page it opens fit the person searching, judged at the moment of the search.
- A minimum bar. An ad has to clear a quality threshold before it can show in a given spot at all.
- How crowded the auction is. How closely the other plumbers' ads compete with yours for the same spot.
- The searcher's situation. Where they are, what device they use, what time it is and the exact words they typed.
- The lift from your extras. Google estimates how much your call button, extra links and other ad assets will help, and counts that too.
Only one of the six is money. Three are things you control by how you build the account: the ad, the page and the assets. So a plumber with a sharper ad and a matching page can land above a rival who bids more, and Google's own help page says better ads often bring the price of a click down too.
A higher spot is worth chasing: more searchers tap the ads nearest the top. Ad Rank also decides whether your call button and extra links show with the ad at all, so a weak score costs you more than one spot.
Notice what is missing from that list: a formula. You may have seen Ad Rank taught as bid multiplied by Quality Score. Google doesn't publish a formula, and the factors above are the ones it actually names. Teach yourself the six inputs and skip the arithmetic.
Quality Score Grades Your Plumbing Keywords After the Fact. It Never Votes in the Auction.
Every keyword in a plumbing account gets a 1-to-10 grade that Google calls Quality Score. Google describes it as "a diagnostic tool" and says outright that it "is not an input in the ad auction." It is a reading on the dashboard, like the pressure gauge on a water heater. The gauge tells you something about the tank. Tapping the gauge doesn't change the pressure.
Underneath that grade are three ratings. Google labels every one of them on a three-step scale, from below average up to above average, judged against the other plumbers bidding on that keyword:
- Expected clickthrough rate: how likely a searcher is to tap your ad when that keyword triggers it.
- Ad relevance: whether the ad answers the plumbing problem the person actually typed.
- Landing page experience: how useful your page is to the person who clicked.
The first of those is easy to misunderstand. Google strips your ad's position and its extras out of that rating on purpose. A bigger bid that lifts you to the top spot doesn't improve it. Neither does adding more extra links. What raises it is ad copy people would rather tap, written for that exact search.
The gauge is still worth reading, because each rating points at a different repair. Add the three rating columns to your keywords view and look for "below average":
- Ad relevance below average usually means the ad group is too broad. A keyword about slab leaks is sharing an ad written for general plumbing. Split it out.
- Landing page experience below average points at the page: the wrong page for the job, a slow page or a page that doesn't match the ad.
- Expected clickthrough rate below average points at the ad's words. Rewrite the headline around what the searcher typed and what they most want to know, which in plumbing is often how fast you can come and what it will cost.
Fix the lowest rating on your most expensive keywords first. Leave keywords with too little traffic alone; Google needs enough searches to rate them at all.
Each Plumbing Job Needs Its Own Ad Group, Its Own Ad and Its Own Page
Of the three ratings, ad relevance is the one a plumbing company can move fastest, and it moves through account structure. An ad group is a small bundle of closely related keywords that share one set of ads. Keep each bundle to one plumbing job and five or six ways of searching for it, and the ad can speak to exactly that job.
In our example market, San Antonio, the first groups would start like this, with monthly searches from Keyword Planner:
- Drain cleaning: "drain cleaning" (880 a month), "drain cleaning near me" (720)
- Water heater repair: "water heater repair" (720), "water heater repair near me" (880)
- Water heater replacement: "water heater replacement" (390)
- Slab leaks: "slab leak repair" (110)
- Sewer line repair: "sewer line repair" (110), "sewer line repair near me" (590)
- Emergency: "emergency plumber" (720), "emergency plumber near me" (880), "24 hour plumber near me" (480)
Your city's numbers will differ. The grouping won't.
Multi-trade shops have an extra reason to build job pages. When we seeded Keyword Planner with the home pages of three large plumbing-and-HVAC companies in the example market, the ideas Google's tool sent back were overwhelmingly about heating and cooling: 2,620 of 2,854 for one site, 2,108 of 2,182 for another and 1,895 of 1,977 for the third. Google's tools read those home pages as HVAC sites. A plumbing ad that lands on one is asking Google to grade a plumbing click against a page about air conditioners. Water heater repair and water heater replacement sit in separate groups on purpose: one person wants the old tank fixed today, the other is pricing a new one, and the ad that works for one sounds wrong to the other.
Each group then gets an ad that says the job back to the searcher, "Water Heaters Fixed Today" for the repair group rather than "Full-Service Plumbing Company," and a landing page about that one job. The search, the ad and the page should thread together like three fittings of the same size. When they do, Google's relevance rating rises, the click is more likely to become a call, and you tend to pay less for the spot.
Six of 12 Plumbing Sites We Checked Ran Ad Offers Their Own Pages Didn't Match
Matching the job is half of it. The other half is making sure the page backs up what the ad promised, and this is where many plumbing accounts quietly leak.
We compared the live Search ads of 12 plumbing companies in the example market against their own websites. Six ran a price or offer in an ad that was different on the site, or missing from it entirely. We are not naming them, because the pattern matters more than the companies:
- An ad for "$99 Drain Clearing" pointed to a site whose coupon said "$89 Drain Clearing Attempt."
- An ad promised a "Free Service Call with Repairs." The site never mentioned it.
- One company showed three different water heater discounts, $150, $250 and $100, across its ad, its landing page and its coupons page.
- An ad offered "50% off" a service the site listed at a flat $99.
The inconsistencies didn't stop at prices. Seven of the 12 showed conflicting years in business across their ads, their Google listings and their sites, and seven showed conflicting review counts.
Each one costs money twice. The homeowner who clicked for $99 drain clearing and finds $89 "attempts" with fine print starts wondering what else won't match, and the back button is one tap away. And the page grade Google gives you is about how well the page serves people who click, which is hard to earn when the page contradicts the ad that sent them.
The fix is unglamorous: one person owns the offer list, and every ad, page and coupon pulls from it. When an offer changes, all three change the same day.
A Plumbing Page Gets One Phone Screen to Prove the Ad Was True
Build every plumbing landing page as if the click came from a phone, in a hurry. The first screen has a short job list:
- The job, by name. If the ad said water heater repair, the headline says water heater repair.
- The offer from the ad, with its terms. Same price, same wording, with any limits stated plainly.
- The phone number, tappable. Large enough to hit with a wet thumb.
- Where you work. The towns or neighborhoods you serve, so the homeowner knows you'll come.
- Your license number, where your state requires it in advertising. Chapter 16 covers which states want it.
Speed belongs on the checklist too. Google's free PageSpeed Insights tool shows how quickly a page loads on a phone and what is slowing it down. Run it on every landing page before launch. It is one check among several, not a reason to rebuild the site, and a fast page that talks about the wrong job still loses.
Plumbing shops that want a matching page behind every ad group can see how our Google Ads management builds them.
Next: Keyword Planner Can't Tell a Shopper From a Repair Call
The ad groups above only work if the keywords inside them are the right ones. Chapter 5 shows how a plumbing company builds its keyword list from competitors' websites, and why a search for a water heater brand and a search for that brand plus "repair" belong to very different customers.
This chapter is part of Google Ads for Plumbers, our sixteen-chapter guide for plumbing companies anywhere in the US.
