How should a plumber run Google Ads?
Split emergency, planned and servicing work into separate campaigns, show your phone number on every ad, and only run emergency ads during hours someone will answer. Target the postcodes you will genuinely travel to, block DIY and job-seeker searches with negative keywords, and judge results on cost per booked job, not cost per click.
Plumbing is one of the best trades there is for Google Ads. A lot of the work is urgent, and urgent customers don't shop around. Someone with water coming through the kitchen ceiling searches, scans the top of the page for a believable local number, and rings it. If that number is yours, the job usually is too.
It's also one of the easiest trades to burn money on. The same searches that bring emergency call-outs sit right next to DIY questions, parts shoppers and people looking for plumbing jobs. Google will happily spend your budget on all of them unless you tell it not to. Here's how we set campaigns up so the money goes on the first group.
Split emergency work from everything else
The single most useful change most plumbers can make is to stop running one campaign for everything. Emergency work, planned work and servicing behave completely differently:
- Emergency: burst pipes, leaks, no hot water, blocked drains. High value, needed now, mostly searched on a phone.
- Planned: boiler installations, bathroom refits, system upgrades. Bigger jobs, longer decisions, people compare a few quotes.
- Servicing and certificates: boiler services, landlord gas safety certificates. Lower value per job but steady and repeatable.
Put each in its own campaign with its own budget. That way an expensive week of emergency searches can't quietly eat the budget you meant for boiler installs, and you can see which kind of work each pound actually buys.
Make it ridiculously easy to ring you
Emergency customers want to talk to someone, not fill in a form. Add a call asset to your ads so your number shows right in the ad, and make sure the page they land on has a tap-to-call button at the top on mobile.
Then answer it. Every missed call is a click you've paid for and handed to the next plumber on the list. If you can't always pick up, a call answering service or a fast call-back routine is worth more than any change to the ads.
Only advertise emergencies when you can actually respond
If you don't do 24-hour call-outs, don't run emergency ads at two in the morning. Use ad scheduling so emergency ads run during the hours you genuinely cover, and let planned-work ads run all day, because people research boiler quotes in the evenings.
The same goes for capacity. If the diary is full for the next fortnight, turn emergency ads down rather than paying for calls you'll have to turn away.
Draw the map honestly
Set your location targeting around the postcodes you'll genuinely travel to, and check the location options so ads show to people in your area rather than people merely interested in it. Otherwise you can end up paying for clicks from someone two counties away who searched your town's name.
It's tempting to draw a huge circle to "get more leads". In practice the jobs on the edge of the map are the ones you'd rather not do, and they cost exactly the same per click as the ones down the road.
Keep the DIYers and job hunters out
This is where most plumbing accounts leak money. Add negative keywords from day one for searches that will never become paid work, such as:
- "how to", "diy", "youtube", "video"
- "jobs", "salary", "apprenticeship", "course", "training"
- "parts", "screwfix", "toolstation", "b&q"
Then look at the search terms report every week or two and keep adding to the list. It's dull, which is exactly why most accounts never get it done. We cover choosing the right keywords in more depth in which Google Ads keywords are worth paying for.
Show people you're safe to let in
People are letting a stranger into their home, often in a panic. Anything that makes you look established helps: your star rating and review count, photos of your van and your own work, and for gas work your Gas Safe registration. Put these on the landing page, not just the homepage, and keep your Google Business Profile up to date, because a lot of people check it before they ring.
Measure booked jobs, not clicks
Clicks and calls are just the start. What matters is how many turned into paid work and what each one cost you. Set up conversion tracking for calls and forms, then keep a simple note of which enquiries became jobs. Cost per booked job is the number that tells you whether the ads are working. We explain why in why cheap leads are usually expensive.
Give it a few months before you judge it. The first weeks are about finding out which searches bring the work you want; the gains come from cutting the ones that don't.
If you'd rather not learn all this the expensive way, that's exactly what we do for plumbers across the Midlands. Book a free chat and we'll tell you honestly whether Google Ads makes sense for your business.