The three numbers in a Google Ads budget
When a plumber asks what Google Ads costs, they are usually asking about one number and being quoted another. There are three:
- Cost per click. Paid to Google every time someone clicks your ad. In plumbing this is high, because everyone clicking has a problem right now and every plumber in the county is bidding on the same words.
- Management fee. Paid to whoever builds and maintains the account. We charge a flat monthly fee and never a percentage of your spend, because a percentage gives your agency a reason to want your bill to go up.
- Cost per booked job. Your total spend divided by the jobs that actually got scheduled. This is the only number that tells you whether to keep going.
An account can have a great cost per click and a terrible cost per booked job. That usually means the ads are showing for the wrong searches, or the calls are not being answered.
Why plumbing clicks cost more than most trades
Three things push plumbing click prices up. The searcher has an emergency, so their intent to buy is close to certain. The job values are high enough that national franchises and lead-generation companies can afford to bid aggressively. And the search volume is concentrated in a handful of phrases, so everyone is fighting over the same auction.
You do not beat that with a bigger budget. You beat it by being more specific: exact-match keywords instead of broad, a radius that matches where a truck can actually get to in an hour, ads that run only when someone answers the phone, and a landing page built for one job rather than a homepage that lists thirty services.
What a realistic starting budget looks like
A first campaign needs enough spend to produce a useful number of calls in the first month. Too little and you cannot tell the difference between a bad account and bad luck. We size the starting budget after looking at three things:
- Your service area. A tight radius around one town costs less to cover than three counties.
- Which jobs you want. Emergency calls, drain cleaning and water heater replacements have very different click prices and very different job values.
- Your dispatch capacity. There is no point buying calls a single truck cannot reach. We would rather run a small budget that fills the schedule than a large one that generates callbacks you never make.
Anyone who quotes you a monthly number before asking those three questions is guessing.
Where plumbing ad budgets get wasted
Most of the waste we find in existing plumbing accounts comes from the same handful of mistakes:
- No negative keywords. Without them you pay for "how to fix a leaking tap", "plumber salary", "plumbing supply near me" and every DIY video search in your area.
- Ads running at 2am with no one on call. If the phone goes to voicemail, the click is a donation.
- One campaign for everything. Emergency and replacement searches need different bids, different ads and different pages. Merged together, the cheap clicks eat the budget that should go to the valuable jobs.
- Landing on the homepage. Someone searching "water heater replacement cost" wants a price range and a financing option, not your company history.
- No call tracking. Without it you cannot separate ad calls from organic calls, so nobody can tell you what worked.
How to judge whether it is working
Give a new account 30 to 60 days before judging it, and judge it on booked jobs rather than clicks or even calls. A simple monthly report should show spend, tracked calls, which campaigns produced them, how many were the kind of work you want, and what each one cost. If your current report shows impressions and click-through rate and nothing else, you are being shown activity instead of results.
The full breakdown of how we structure a plumbing account, including the campaign split and the negative keyword list we start with, is on our Google Ads for plumbers page.
Common questions
Is Google Ads worth it for a small plumbing company?
It can be, if you answer the phone during the hours the ads run and you can service the calls. A two-truck company with a tight radius often gets better returns than a larger company covering a whole county badly.
Should I run ads or do SEO?
Both, in sequence. Ads produce calls in weeks; SEO builds the service and area pages that keep producing without ad spend. Most plumbers start with the Google Business Profile and one emergency campaign, then let SEO take over the core services.
Do you charge a percentage of ad spend?
No. A flat monthly management fee, and the ad account stays in your name so you keep the history if we ever part ways.
How fast do the calls start?
Ads can show within a day of launch. The first month is mostly about finding which searches convert and cutting the ones that do not.
Where to start
If you already run ads, the fastest thing you can do is open the search terms report and read what people actually typed before they clicked. Most plumbers find money leaking there within ten minutes. If you want a second opinion, we will review the account and tell you what we would change first. See Google Ads management or the full plumbing marketing playbook.