How to judge a marketing agency for a plumbing company

Late July is the one stretch of the year when most plumbing owners have an hour to think. The freeze calls are months away, the Thanksgiving drain rush is further still, and the agency pitches keep arriving. Most of them promise “more calls”. Very few ask how many of your calls get answered, which is the first thing anyone who has worked with plumbers should ask.

Here is the checklist we would hand a plumbing owner interviewing agencies, including us. Every point is something you can verify in the first meeting.

Start with the phone, not the ads

Invoca published its 2026 home services benchmarks this month, built from calls tracked across its customers, and the plumbing rows are worth reading closely. Plumbing companies answered 74% of their calls with a person, the best of the nine home service trades in the report. Of the calls that were answered, 30% were sales leads. Of those leads, 55% booked on the call.

Run that through a hundred calls and you get about 74 answered, about 22 real leads and about 12 booked jobs. So when an agency reports “100 calls this month”, it is describing roughly a dozen jobs, and possibly fewer, because Invoca’s figures are averages across its own customers. In our experience, a shop where the owner is also on the tools answers less often than that.

A serious agency will want to record and score your calls and match them to booked jobs in your field software. If the first proposal leads with impressions and clicks, the agency has not yet thought about how plumbing work actually arrives.

Questions that sort agencies quickly

Ask these in the first meeting and listen for specifics:

1. What exactly goes in the monthly report? The right answer names answered calls, scored leads, booked jobs and cost per booked job, by channel. “Calls” alone is not a result.
2. What happens to calls after hours? Invoca’s own advice is blunt: if you cannot dispatch or book callers off-hours, pause the paid campaigns that drive calls into those windows unless an AI agent is handling them. An agency happy to run emergency ads into a voicemail box is spending your money on the next plumber’s behalf.
3. Where does our license number go? In Texas, every ad designed to win plumbing work must state the Responsible Master Plumber’s license number, whatever the medium, and that includes business cards, flyers and referral coupons. The board’s penalty schedule lists $1,000 for leaving it off. California requires the number in all forms of advertising, and Florida in every advertisement regardless of medium. An agency that writes your ads without asking for the number has not worked with plumbers in those states.
4. How will you get us reviews? BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer review survey found 47% of people will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews, and 74% only care about reviews written in the last three months. The FTC’s rule from August 2024 bans paying for reviews conditioned on a positive sentiment. Anyone offering to sell you reviews is offering you a federal problem.
5. Will you treat emergency and planned work differently? A burst pipe search and a water heater quote need different ads, pages and hours. BrightLocal’s study published earlier this month found trades customers weigh pricing more than customers of any other industry, with 36% citing it while they research, so planned-work pages should show price ranges or a service-call fee.
6. Who holds the logins? Your Google profile, the Local Services Ads account that carries your license and insurance verification, call tracking and the website should all be in your name, with the agency added as a user. Redoing that verification because an agency kept the account is a few weeks of lost calls.

What the first ninety days should look like

A plan for a plumbing company should follow the order the work arrives in, so it reads roughly like this:

• Weeks 1 to 3: call tracking and recording on every number, the answer rate measured by hour of the day, and an agreed definition of a booked job. If nights and weekends are uncovered, the agency should propose on-call routing, an answering service or an AI voice agent before it proposes more spend.
• Weeks 2 to 6: the Google profile rebuilt with real truck and job photos, emergency hours, the right service areas and the license number wherever your state wants it. A review request goes out by text after every job.
• Weeks 4 to 10: Local Services Ads checked or applied for, and search campaigns split into emergency and planned work, each scheduled to the hours someone can answer. Google now shows a single Google Verified badge on those ads, and an agency still promising the old guarantee badge has not kept up since October 2025.
• Weeks 8 to 13: past customers. Water heater age reminders, a winterizing message before the first freeze and a note before Thanksgiving.

Notice what is missing from the first month: a new website. Sometimes the site is the problem, but in this trade the phone, the profile and the reviews usually are.

What a good report looks like

One page, every month, in this order:

• Calls by channel, with how many were answered and how many were real leads.
• Booked jobs by channel, pulled from your field software rather than estimated.
• Cost per booked job, emergency and planned work shown separately.
• Reviews added in the month, and the date of the newest one.
• What changes next month, and why.

If you want a benchmark for the cost side, LocaliQ’s 2025 home services report put the median cost per lead for plumbing search ads at $129.02, from campaigns running April 2024 to March 2025, against $90.92 for home services overall. That is a median across other companies’ accounts, not a target and not a promise, but it tells you whether a quoted figure is in the right neighborhood.

What to do this month

• Pull last month’s call log and count answered against missed calls, split by hour. That one sheet will tell you more than any pitch deck.
• Walk around your trucks. In Texas the license number belongs on both sides in letters at least two inches tall, preceded by “M”, “MPL” or “RMP”.
• Ask your current agency, in writing, for cost per booked job by channel. If they cannot produce it, you have your answer.
• Search your own trade and town on a phone and note who holds the three map positions and how fresh their reviews are.
• Decide who answers at 2 a.m. before the first cold night, not during it.

We wrote down how we approach this trade, from the license rules to the winter calendar, on our plumbing marketing page. If paid search and Local Services Ads are the part you want a second opinion on, start with how we run Google Ads for service companies.