Heating · Air conditioning · Plumbing
Dallas, TX · since 2014
A company called Rescue Air sells plumbing too. Almost none of its own customers knew that
Twice the plumbing work sold from search, and most of it came from people who were already customers.
- Google Ads
- Local Services Ads
- Meta Ads
- Call tracking
- Two quarters against the two before them
Movements are Lonta’s own reconstruction of how this account was run — ranges rather than figures exported from a report Rescue Air has signed off.
Who this is
Rescue Air has been heating and cooling houses in Dallas since 2014. In November 2021 they merged with Texas Green Plumbing, which is where the plumbing trucks came from. One licence in the footer, TACLB00056156E.
So the business sells three trades and the brand announces one of them. That is not a branding mistake — the name was seven years old and worth something by the time plumbing arrived. It is just a fact the advertising has to work around.
What the account was doing with plumbing
Plumbing was not being ignored. It was worse than that: it was sharing a budget with air conditioning in a Dallas August.
In a shared budget the trade with the higher ticket and the tighter deadline wins every auction, every hour, automatically. Nobody decides it. A plumbing keyword does not lose because somebody judged it less important; it loses because a system was asked to spend the money where it converts fastest, and in August that is never the water heater.
Paid search spend by trade, indexed to the largest bar in each row. Google Ads, two quarters either side of the split.
Two trades in one budget is not a split. It is an auction that the seasonal trade wins twelve times a year.
The cheapest customer is the one who already has your number
A heating and cooling company that has been running since 2014 has thousands of households who have let one of its technicians into the hallway. Those people are not a cold audience. They are the warmest list the business will ever own, and they were being advertised to as though they had never heard the name.
We did not buy them again. We wrote to them, and we stopped bidding on them in search, which is a saving nobody notices until it shows up in the plumbing number.
- Plumbing enquiries100163+63%
- Booked visits5194+84%
- Jobs sold2654+108%
Indexed to 100 plumbing enquiries in the earlier window. Call tracking into the client's CRM, matched quarters.
The search terms told us which company people thought this was
Read the non-brand plumbing terms next to the brand terms and the shape of the problem is obvious. People searched the brand and wanted air conditioning. People searched plumbing and found somebody else.
| Search term | Call | Why |
|---|---|---|
| rescue air | Kept | Brand. Cheap, converts, and almost entirely heating and cooling intent. |
| water heater replacement dallas | Moved | High-ticket plumbing intent, losing every August auction to air conditioning. |
| plumber near me | Moved | The plumbing equivalent of the term the business runs on. It needed its own budget to exist. |
| tankless water heater cost | Kept | Research intent, but the ticket justifies waiting. Sent to a page with a price range on it. |
| how to fix a running toilet | Cut | Somebody with a screwdriver already in their hand. |
Search terms from the two quarters before the split. The verdicts are decisions we made, not recommendations the platform offered.
What we changed, in order
Nothing here is clever in isolation. The sequence is the whole method: measurement first, then separation, then spend.
- Weeks 1–2Calls tied through to the CRM so a plumbing call could be followed to a plumbing invoice rather than counted at pickup.
- Week 3Plumbing lifted out of the shared budget into its own campaigns. This is the only step that had to happen before any of the others could be measured.
- Weeks 4–5A plumbing landing page that does not open with an air conditioner. The previous one ranked fine and converted badly, which is a combination that hides for years.
- Weeks 6–8The existing customer list mailed about the second trade, and excluded from paid search so the account stopped buying people it already had.
- Weeks 9–10Local Services Ads opened on the plumbing categories, which is where the cost per sold job came down hardest.
Week 3 was reversed for four days in July when heating and cooling ran short, and put back.
What it cost
Air conditioning gave up almost thirty per cent of its spend. In a Dallas summer that is not a free trade and we will not pretend it was: some heating and cooling work that would have been bought was not bought.
The argument for doing it anyway is that the plumbing side was starting from nearly nothing, so the first dollars moved across were worth far more than the last dollars taken away. That argument stops working at some point. We have not found where yet, which is an honest way of saying we have not pushed it far enough to find out.
What this does not prove
- Plumbing was a small base, so a doubling is a smaller achievement than the multiple makes it sound. Doubling something that started at nineteen per cent of spend is a different thing from doubling the main trade.
- The customer-list mailing and the budget split shipped five weeks apart in the same account, and we did not hold one back to isolate the other. Some of the plumbing gain belongs to people who already knew the company.
- Cost per sold plumbing job came down partly because Local Services Ads entered the mix, and that channel prices differently from search. The comparison is honest at the account level and unfair at the channel level.
- Two quarters is not enough to see a full water-heater cycle, which is the trade's slowest and highest-ticket work.
- We reduced heating and cooling spend during a Texas summer. We can show what plumbing gained. We cannot show what air conditioning would have earned with the money back.
What to take from this
- Never let two trades share one budgetThe trade with the higher ticket wins every auction, so the other one disappears gradually without anybody ever deciding to stop selling it.
- Check what your own name promisesIf the brand says one trade, brand search will deliver that trade and the second one has to be bought from strangers at full price until you tell your existing customers it exists.
- Exclude your customer list from paid searchPaying to reach somebody who already has your number in their phone is the most expensive way to send an email.
- Give the second trade its own landing pageA page that opens with an air conditioner will rank for plumbing and convert like an air conditioner, and the ranking is what stops anyone investigating.
Questions people ask about this one
- Why not just add plumbing keywords to the existing campaigns?
- Because a campaign optimises toward whatever converts fastest inside it, and in Dallas that is always the cooling emergency. Plumbing keywords added to a heating and cooling campaign will receive whatever budget is left after the August auctions, which in practice is close to nothing. Separation is not organisational tidiness; it is the only way the second trade gets to spend.
- Does a merged company need to rebrand to sell the second trade?
- No, and in this case rebranding would have destroyed something valuable. A name with seven years of reviews behind it is an asset. What the name does mean is that the second trade cannot rely on brand search and has to be sold deliberately — to the existing customer base first, because those people already trust the company and only need to be told.
- How much of the plumbing growth came from existing customers?
- Most of the early growth. Households buying a second trade rose about seventy per cent, and those jobs cost a fraction of a job sold to a stranger. That is also the honest caveat on the headline number: a customer base is a finite resource, and the growth rate from mailing it is not a growth rate you can extend forever.
- What happened to the heating and cooling side?
- It spent roughly thirty per cent less and we did not run a holdout, so we cannot tell you what it would have earned with the money back. What we can say is that the account's overall cost per sold job improved while the mix shifted, which is the number the business actually banks.
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