Contractors · Plumbing
Nobody compares three plumbers at two in the morning.
Plumbing has the strongest buying intent in the trades and the widest spread of job values. That combination makes it the most expensive work to advertise and the easiest to measure badly, because a single blended cost per lead hides which half of the business is actually paying for itself.
Written by someone who has been on the vans · Drains, heaters, repipes and reno
A burst pipe, 11:40pm
11:40
Water on the floor
They search on a phone, standing in it.
11:41
First listing called
Straight to an answering machine. Hangs up.
11:42
Second listing called
A real voice. Books it before hearing a price.
11:43
Your ad was third
You paid for the click. Nobody called you.
What is different about marketing a plumbing company?
Plumbing covers job values from under two hundred dollars to well over ten thousand, all triggered by different searches with different urgency. Marketing it well means splitting the work into distinct campaigns with distinct targets, and accepting that the emergency half is won by whoever answers rather than whoever advertises best.
That is an uncomfortable finding for an agency to deliver, because the fix is often not more advertising. Before any budget conversation is worth having, two things have to be true: someone picks up outside business hours, and the work is separated so each type can be judged on its own cost per booked job.
Once those are in place the arithmetic opens up. A plumbing customer who signs a service agreement, or who comes back for a water heater eighteen months after a drain call, is worth several times a single transaction. That is what lets you outbid a competitor who is still pricing each job as a one-off.
The buckets
Five kinds of work, five sets of numbers
- Drain and clog work
- Cheap to buy, easy to close, low ticket. Worth advertising because it fills the day and produces reviews, but a business measured on it alone will never fund growth. Treat it as the entry point and make sure the technician is equipped to find the next job while on site.
- Water heaters
- The best-behaved product in plumbing. Predictable lifespan, an obvious failure event, a same-day decision and a respectable ticket. Deserves its own campaign, its own page and its own financing message, and almost never gets any of them.
- Repipes and service upgrades
- Five-figure work with a research phase and multiple quotes. Search intent is broader, the copy has to educate, and the follow-up has to run for weeks. This is where automation earns its keep.
- Bathroom and kitchen renovation
- Effectively a different business. The buyer is choosing a designer as much as a plumber, the decision takes months, and photography does more selling than any ad copy will.
- Emergency and after-hours
- The highest click prices in the trades and the shortest decision window. Nobody compares three plumbers at 2am. This bucket is won entirely on whether a human answers, which makes it a staffing decision dressed up as a marketing one.
A plumbing account running all five of these as one campaign is the most common setup we see, and the reason so many owners believe their marketing is not working when in fact two of the five are profitable and being subsidised by the other three.
How it works
Separate, answer, then grow the ticket
Sort the work into buckets
Week 1A drain call and a repipe cannot share a campaign, a page or a target. Until the work is separated, cost per lead is an average of five unrelated numbers and tells you nothing you can act on.
Fix what happens after hours
Weeks 2–3Missed-call text-back, an answering arrangement with a real person, and an out-of-hours routing rule. In plumbing this is usually the single largest recoverable loss, and it costs less than the advertising already being wasted on unanswered calls.
Give water heaters their own path
Week 4One campaign, one page, pricing visible, financing stated, and same-day availability made obvious. The highest-return piece of structural work available to most plumbing businesses.
Sell the second job
OngoingEvery drain call is a house with an ageing water heater and a panel of old shutoffs. A service agreement, a record of what was seen, and a reminder that fires at the right time turns one-off calls into a pipeline you do not have to buy twice.
Fit
Where we help and where we do not
This is a good fit if
- You want a better mix of work, not simply a higher call count.
- You will either staff the phones after hours or let us arrange someone who does.
- You install water heaters and want more of that work specifically.
- You are willing to record what each job was worth so the numbers mean something.
This isn't the right fit if
- You want emergency leads at a fixed price per lead. That is a lead-broker product, and you will be one of four plumbers called about the same burst pipe.
- Calls outside 9 to 5 go to voicemail and that is not going to change. Half of plumbing demand happens outside those hours.
- Only drain work interests you. The volume is buyable, but there is not enough margin in it to build a marketing system around.
Other trades
The economics change by trade
Ticket range is the plumbing problem. Weather and storms drive the other two.
Roofing
Demand arrives in bursts after weather, the homeowner collects three quotes, and the fastest responder usually wins.
HVAC
Two businesses in one: emergency no-heat calls, and planned replacements sold months before the season turns.
Electrical
Three revenue streams sharing one van, and only the middle one — panels, service changes and EV — responds to advertising.
Handyman
Small tickets and short drives, where filtering the work and getting called back decides more than lead volume ever does.
What it takes
The parts of the system
Google & Meta Ads
Search, Local Services and paid social, judged on one number: what it costs to put a booked job on the calendar.
Business phone & call tracking
Calls that reach a person, missed calls counted, and every call attributed to the campaign that produced it.
Lead response & follow-up
Enquiries answered in minutes at any hour, quotes chased for a month, reviews requested automatically. Email sequences included.
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
The map pack is where most local service work is actually won. Category, services, photos, reviews and a profile that stays current.
Questions plumbers ask
Why is plumbing advertising so expensive?
Because the intent is unusually strong and the supply of it is fixed. Someone searching for an emergency plumber will hire within the hour, so every competitor bids hard for that moment. The escape is not a cheaper click — it is a higher average ticket and a second job from the same customer.
Local Services Ads or search ads for a plumber?
Local Services Ads first. They sit above search ads, charge per lead, and the Google Guaranteed badge does real work with an anxious caller. Search ads then cover what LSAs do not — water heaters, repipes and renovation work, where the buyer wants to read before they phone.
How much does answering the phone actually matter?
It is decisive. Most emergency callers do not leave voicemail; they ring the next listing. That means a missed call is not a delayed job, it is a lost one, and you have already paid for it. Measuring missed calls usually reorders every other priority on the list.
Should we publish our prices?
For the predictable work, yes — diagnostic fees, drain clearing, water heater ranges. It filters out shoppers before they cost you a technician visit and it builds trust with everyone else. For custom work, publish a range and the factors that move it rather than a single number.
We are drowning in cheap drain calls. What now?
Rebalance rather than cut. Keep enough of that volume to fill the schedule, then build the water heater and service-upgrade campaigns properly and set separate targets for each. The goal is a better mix, not fewer calls.
Do service agreements really change the marketing?
They change the arithmetic behind it. Once a customer is worth more than one transaction, you can afford to pay more to acquire them than a competitor who sells one job at a time. That is usually how a plumbing business stops competing on click price.
Related: the contractors hub ·CRM and lead follow-up for a small business
How many calls went unanswered last month?
The free audit counts them, then checks whether your work is separated into campaigns that can be judged individually and what each type of job is currently costing you to book.
You talk to Mathew.Not an account manager, and not a sales team.