Plumber ads at night: keep the after-hours schedule or cut it to office hours?

Emergency services are a good example of this. Take a plumber running Search ads around the clock on a flat budget. A lot of the late clicks come from someone with a burst pipe at 11pm who'll pay almost anything to get a person out. But if those calls roll to voicemail, you're paying for leads you can't serve, and cost per lead only looks good until you check how many actually booked.

Cutting the schedule back to office hours feels safe, but it shuts out exactly the people you want to reach. I think it comes down to whether someone picks up. If there's an on-call line, keep the night hours and lower the bids with a bid adjustment instead of switching them off. If there isn't, turn them off. Has anyone measured answer rates on after-hours calls against booked jobs?

Agreed on the on-call test. The measurement problem is that Google may be counting voicemail calls as conversions. Call conversions fire once a call passes a minimum duration, and a 40-second ring-out can clear that bar, so after-hours cost per lead looks fine while nobody actually picks up. If a plumber imports booked jobs as offline conversions and compares them with the call conversion, the gap between the two numbers tells you more than answer rate does. That gap is what I'd tune the night bid adjustment against.

I'm not sure the 40-second ring-out example holds. Call duration usually starts counting when the call connects, not when the phone starts ringing, so an unanswered call shouldn't clear the bar. The bigger leak is probably a voicemail greeting that runs longer than your minimum duration, so I'd check that setting before trusting the gap.

An unanswered call can still clear the bar. What counts is whether the call connected on the caller's side, and a voicemail or carrier pickup counts as connected. So a 40-second ring-out that ends in a greeting is still a call Google can count. It's really the same leak you're describing, just triggered differently. Either way, pull the call history, filter for calls a person actually answered, and compare that count to your call conversions.

Google can't tell a voicemail greeting from a live answer, so the answered-call filter has to come from your phone system's logs, not the Ads call report. Once you have that count, raise the minimum duration on the after-hours call conversion to a length that only a real conversation reaches.

Raising the threshold helps, but I wouldn't lean on it too far. An after-hours line often has an IVR or a long greeting, something like "you've reached Hallam Plumbing, press 1 for emergencies, press 2 to leave a message." That can easily run past a 60-second minimum, so the call still counts even though nobody reached a person. The duration bar only works if the greeting is clearly shorter than the bar, and most businesses never time their own greeting, so do a test call before picking a number.

The cleanest fix is probably to send after-hours calls to a number that either rings a human or goes straight to voicemail with a short greeting. That way the duration rule is measuring something real. I haven't verified how Google handles ring time on every setup, so test that too rather than assume it.