How We Helped Benjamin Franklin Plumbing Have Their Best Month in Four Years
What started as an SEO rescue became something bigger. IMA now runs marketing for Benjamin Franklin Plumbing as a true marketing partner. IMA managers paid media across Bay Area markets, local and AI search, offline brand, and the revenue infrastructure underneath it. In July 2026 they posted their best revenue month in over four years.
Strategy
IMA runs our full Digital Marketing Quadrant (DMQ) for Benjamin Franklin Plumbing. This includes managing paid media across every Bay Area market, local and AI search, offline and brand, conversion and speed-to-lead infrastructure, and the reporting that ties all of it back to booked revenue in ServiceTitan.
Platforms
Google Ads · Local Service Ads · Google Business Profile · Local SEO · ServiceTitan · AI Search · Offline & Brand
Best Month in Four Years
Paid Media Scaled
Project Overview
Benjamin Franklin Plumbing serves the San Francisco Bay Area from locations across the North Bay, South Bay, Peninsula, and San Francisco. The Owner and CEO has never been passive about marketing. We've worked with him since 2005 and he is aggressive, growth-minded, and holds his partners accountable. Our favorite kind of client.
How the relationship started. IMA was already working on a number of projects, but their Search Engine Optimization was being handled by a separate legacy agency that the franchisor recommended. A review of their analytics made the problem obvious: organic growth was flat. Too many thin local pages, no quality content, no big-picture plan. We took SEO over, cut more than forty underperforming local pages down to the nine that were actually working, rebuilt keyword targeting around hero terms, and layered in our Digital Marketing Quadrant.
The result was a 607% increase in organic traffic and a 62% increase in calls from the website in only twelve months. That was an additional 350 calls a month. Calls from organic overtook calls from paid, on an SEO budget that was 15% of the paid search budget.
"My organic traffic has increased by 607%. In addition, my calls from SEO are up 62%. Even my conversion rate on organic calls is up. I'm definitely happy I made the switch to IMA."
Dan Gagne
CEO at Benjamin Franklin Plumbing
Why the engagement changed. That win earned us more of the business, and more of the business exposed a different problem. Benjamin Franklin Plumbing didn't need another channel specialist. They needed someone accountable for the whole number. A true partner who could decide where the next dollar goes across paid, local, organic, AI and offline, wire the tracking so those decisions could be judged on booked revenue instead of clicks, and sit in the room when the budget gets set.
Execution
Our Digital Marketing Quadrant is customized for each client. Here is what it actually covers in this case.
Paid media across every market. We rebuilt Benjamin Franklin Plumbing's paid program from the ground up starting in early 2025. Today it runs as a disciplined matrix across four Bay Area markets (South Bay, North Bay, Peninsula, San Francisco) against seven campaign themes each: brand defense, core plumbing, general service, water heaters, sewer, and drain cleaning. Thirty-four campaigns, one naming convention, zero sprawl. Every market gets its own brand campaign so acquisition cost is never flattered by brand traffic, and budget moves between markets on performance rather than habit.
Local Service Ads. We help the client run LSAs alongside search, and they are the cheapest lead source in the account at roughly two and a half times cheaper per lead than paid search. Knowing that, and acting on it, is a budget allocation decision, not a campaign management decision.
Local SEO and the intent shift. In spring 2025 we made a deliberate call that cost Benjamin Franklin Plumbing a lot of traffic on purpose. AI answers were eating the informational blog searches that had driven their volume for years but this was high traffic, low intent, no phone calls. We moved on-page SEO toward local, high-intent, city-level terms: fewer searches, better customers. Their Novato and Concord pages now sit at position 1.7. Forty percent of their ranking keywords are in the top three.
AI search and AEO. We track where Benjamin Franklin Plumbing shows up when someone asks an AI instead of Google. They currently hold 248 citations across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode and Grok. We know which pages earn them and which do not. Local search and AI search are two different games, and we play them separately.
Offline and brand. Digital does not run in a vacuum for a business this size. We sit on the brand and traditional side of the plan too, and have helped implement OTT, billboards, radio and local neighborhood domination tactics.
Speed to lead. A lead that sits is a lead that's gone. We implemented speed-to-lead so inbound inquiries get contacted while the homeowner is still deciding, instead of hours later when they've already booked someone else.
Revenue infrastructure. This is the part most agencies skip. We wired ServiceTitan directly into Google Ads, so the platform optimizes toward booked jobs and completed jobs. Enhanced conversions are live. Thirty-two conversion actions are configured and maintained. When we say a market is working, we can show it in the job data.
Results
July 2026 was Benjamin Franklin Plumbing's best month in over four years.
That is the number that matters, and it is the product of every pillar working at once rather than any single channel.
Underneath it:
- Paid media scaled roughly 6X year over year with cost per lead flat. From August 2024–July 2025 to August 2025–July 2026, spend went from $140,653 to $864,161 and tracked conversions went from 630 to 3,878. Cost per conversion moved from $223.32 to $222.86, a change of less than half a percent. Scaling six times without paying more per lead is the hardest thing to do in paid media, and it is the clearest evidence the structure is sound.
- Local Service Ads deliver leads at roughly 40% of the cost of paid search — $90 versus $223. That gap is why LSA gets funded first.
- Brand campaigns produce 20% of all conversions on 2.9% of the spend. Proper brand separation is why the acquisition numbers above are honest.
- The intent shift worked. Their Novato city page earns roughly 43 times more traffic value per click than their best-performing blog post. Fewer clicks, dramatically better ones which is exactly what we designed for.
- 248 AI citations across six of the seven major AI platforms, tracked and attributed to specific pages.
And there is room left. Benjamin Franklin Plumbing currently captures about 43% of available search impressions in their markets. Only 4.9% of what they miss is lost to budget. The rest is lost to rank. That is a growth roadmap, not a ceiling, and we're aggressively working with .
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