How a $6M Plumbing Company Discovered Close Rate Was 62% on Google Calls and 28% on Facebook Leads

A Pacific Northwest plumbing operator doing around $6M a year called his marketing agency in January and said the same thing half the owners in his mastermind had been saying: he was spending more on ads, getting more leads, and closing fewer of them.

The dashboard looked fine. Cost per lead was hovering around $95, right in line with LocaliQ's 2025 home services benchmark of $90.92. Monthly lead volume was up 18% year over year. Revenue was flat.

He pulled two months of data into a spreadsheet and split it one way the agency dashboard never did. Lead source against close rate. Google search calls were closing at 62%. Facebook lead form submissions were closing at 28%.

The spreadsheet before the split

For two years the shop had been running what most operators of its size run. Google Search, Google Local Services Ads, a Facebook campaign the agency swore was "crushing," and a tangle of referral and repeat work that nobody attributed cleanly.

The agency reported on cost per lead, cost per click, and booked jobs. They did not report on close rate by source. The owner could tell you how many leads Facebook produced last month. He could not tell you how many of those leads turned into signed invoices.

Every lead in his CRM was tagged the same way. "Web form." "Inbound call." No campaign ID, no UTM, nothing tying the lead back to whether it came from a search ad or a boosted Facebook post.

The call that broke the spreadsheet

The inflection point was a Tuesday in February. A Facebook lead came in for a water heater replacement. The homeowner filled out a form, got a callback within nine minutes, spoke to the CSR for seven minutes, and booked an estimate.

The tech drove 34 miles, did the walkthrough, quoted $4,800 for a tankless conversion, and the homeowner said she wanted to "talk to her husband." Two weeks of follow-up texts went nowhere. The job died.

That same morning, a Google search call came in for the exact same scope. The job closed on the first visit at $5,200. Same product, same market, same tech.

The owner pulled every lead from the last 60 days and tagged each one by channel by hand. What he saw shook the way he budgeted for the rest of the year.

What the split showed

Google search calls closed at 62%. Facebook form fills closed at 28%. Google Local Services Ads closed at 58%. Referrals closed at 74%.

Invoca's 2025 Home Services Call Conversion Benchmarks Report, built on more than 60 million tracked calls, puts the picture in context. 37% of phone leads convert during the call itself, and 61% of callers speak directly to a rep. Phone calls convert to 10-15x more revenue than web leads across the home services category.

Facebook volume had grown because the agency optimized for lead count. Google volume had stayed flat because Google Ads are auction-driven and more expensive per click. But the Google leads were four times more valuable per dollar spent once close rate entered the equation.

Text Sully: what was my close rate by lead source last 60 days for jobs over $2,000?

The CSR who proved it was not the lead, it was the handoff

Before the owner declared Facebook a loss, he did one more check. He pulled call recordings from the two best-performing CSRs against the two worst.

The best CSR closed Facebook form-fill leads at 41%. The worst closed them at 12%. The spread on Google calls was tighter. 66% vs 54%. The Facebook leads were not worthless. They were more fragile and needed a better front door.

Hatch's analysis of more than 163,000 HVAC estimate follow-up campaigns found an average response rate of 60% on text follow-up, with the best-performing campaigns hitting 90% and the worst bottoming out at 17.82%. The gap between the best and the worst campaign was not the channel. It was the speed and the script.

The finding: Facebook leads were 2.3x more sensitive to response time than Google calls. A Google call converter could take a four-hour lag and still close. A Facebook form fill dropped 40% after 30 minutes of silence.

Text Sully: average minutes to first contact on Facebook leads this month?

What the morning brief started showing

Once the data was clean, the owner built a daily brief that lived in his text messages. Every morning at 6:45 AM his phone buzzed with the numbers from the day before. Leads by source. Close rate by source. Average minutes to first contact. Active quotes over $3,000 aged more than three days.

He stopped making Monday decisions on gut. When the Facebook close rate slipped three days in a row, the morning brief caught it. When a specific Google keyword started booking at 71%, he saw it by Friday, not by month-end.

Jobber's 2025 Home Service Economic Report, built on data from more than 250,000 home service professionals, found that high-confidence businesses are more likely to market across multiple digital channels and are converting leads at higher rates. Confidence in this context is a synonym for attribution. Owners who know what is working invest in it.

The rebalance that added $340K in booked work

After 90 days of tracking, the owner did three things.

He cut Facebook ad spend by 35% and redirected the dollars into Google search and LSA. LSA specifically because A1 Garage Door's Tommy Mello has been public about A1's call center booking 89% of inquiries against an industry average of 42%, and Google's high-intent call traffic is where those booking rates live.

He built a rule that any Facebook lead not contacted within 10 minutes got escalated to his ops manager. Hatch's data that 9 out of 10 text messages are read within 3 minutes of delivery was the benchmark. Contractors are 21x more likely to close a deal when they respond inside 5 minutes versus 30.

He instituted a weekly CSR scorecard. Close rate by source, by CSR, by quote size. The worst CSR on Facebook got targeted coaching, not fired. Her close rate on Facebook climbed from 12% to 29% in six weeks.

Booked revenue over the following quarter was $340,000 higher than the same quarter the year before. Ad spend was down 8%.

Text Sully: which CSR closes Facebook leads best this month?

The quote that would not have closed without the split

One of John Wilson's consistent themes on the Owned and Operated podcast is that response time and proposal view time predict closes, and a 10-point jump in proposal strength correlates with roughly $960 higher average ticket. Wilson, who runs an 8-figure Ohio HVAC, plumbing, and electrical shop on the way to $100M in revenue, keeps saying sales solve almost everything.

The Pacific Northwest plumber's version of that lesson was narrower. He found a $18,000 sewer main job in the Facebook data that the agency dashboard had labeled "cold." The lead had come in 11 days earlier, gotten a voicemail, and never been called back. One of his techs hand-dialed it as an experiment. The homeowner had gotten two other quotes and was ready to sign.

The tech closed it that afternoon. Not because Facebook leads are gold. Because the shop had built a system for the ones that were.

What this means for your shop

Blended close rates lie. A 45% overall close rate can hide a 62% Google close rate propping up a 28% Facebook close rate, and the second number is where your money is leaking.

Split the data the way it actually behaves. By source, by CSR, by quote size, by response time. Every one of those dimensions predicts close rate differently, and your CRM is almost certainly capturing the raw inputs you need even if no dashboard surfaces them.

Build the brief you actually look at. A morning text with five numbers beats a weekly PDF nobody reads. If you want to see what attribution plus a chat interface looks like, read our guide on AI lead qualification agents for home services and missed call text-back for contractors.

The plumbers who will be at $10M in three years are the ones who can answer this question from their phone at 6:45 AM without logging into anything. What closed yesterday, what did not, and why.

Sources

• Home Services Call Conversion Benchmarks Report 2025, Invoca
• 2025 Search Ad Benchmarks for Home Services, LocaliQ
• Jobber Home Service Economic Report, 2024 Review and 2025 Outlook
• HVAC Estimate Follow-Up Response Rates, Hatch
• Maximize Your Leads with Tommy Mello, ServiceTitan
• Owned and Operated podcast, John Wilson