Home Services & Trades · Scenario 27

Plumbing Company

Leads come from everywhere — search, vans, referrals, a directory, the radio — and the owner can’t say which actually book jobs. We model the mix and move the budget to what pays.

Method · Marketing-mix modeling

The situation

A plumbing company runs a dozen marketing channels and judges them by gut and by whichever salesperson shouts loudest. Some channels look busy but book low-margin drain calls; others quietly drive the high-value repipes and water-heater installs. Without a model, budget flows to noise and the profitable channels go under-fed.

Attribution is muddied because customers see several touchpoints before they call, and emergency demand is partly driven by weather and seasonality that has nothing to do with marketing — so raw lead counts mislead.

12 channels

running, unmeasured

Gut feel

how budget is split

Loudest wins

not most profitable

No model

of channel impact

Where we dig for the truth

We build a marketing-mix model that separates each channel’s true contribution to booked, profitable jobs from seasonality and overlap.

Spend by channel & weekBooked jobs & revenueJob type & marginCall-tracking dataWeather & seasonalityPromotions & pricing

Local search and the branded vans quietly drive most profitable jobs; the directory and radio absorbing real budget barely move revenue once overlap is removed.

Our approach — Marketing-Mix Modeling (MMM)

Marketing-mix modeling uses weeks of spend and results to estimate each channel’s incremental effect on booked, profitable jobs — controlling for weather, seasonality and the fact that channels overlap. Each channel gets a true return, and diminishing-returns curves show where the next dollar stops paying.

Budget shifts from low-return channels to the ones that drive high-margin work, and spend is re-weighted toward the job types — installs, repipes — that actually carry the business.

Cutting the directory and re-weighting toward search, vans and referrals roughly halves the blended cost of a booked, profitable job.

What changes

Same total budget, allocated by model. Representative for a mid-size plumbing company.

Why this is not "social media management"

We didn't tell this company to spend more. We modelled which marketing actually books profitable jobs and moved the budget there — the difference between busy and profitable. Marketing-mix modeling is the analytics behind every dollar.

Frequently asked questions

How do you know which marketing channels book plumbing jobs?

We build a marketing-mix model that estimates each channel's true contribution to booked, profitable jobs — separating overlap and the weather-driven demand that has nothing to do with marketing. Budget then moves to the channels that drive high-margin work.

What is marketing-mix modeling (MMM)?

MMM is a statistical method that uses your spend and results over time to estimate the incremental effect of each channel and where it hits diminishing returns. It is how large advertisers allocate budget without relying on click attribution alone.

Isn't more advertising the answer?

Not if much of it is wasted. We model what actually books profitable jobs and reallocate, often halving the cost per job. Book a marketing audit.

Want this run on your numbers?

Share your channel spend and booked-job data and we’ll model what actually pays.