Pay for booked jobs, not clicks.

It depends far more on the trade than on the bid. Across 524 contractors and $14.6M of non-branded spend, plumbing leads averaged $183, while Local Services Ads run between $30 and $100 per lead. Emergency drain work is cheaper and converts faster; repipes and commercial contracts cost more and are worth far more. We set a target per trade rather than one number for the whole account.

Enough to buy a readable number of leads in your area, and not a penny more until the tracking proves the maths. In most markets that means starting on a single trade with the best margin, learning what a booked job costs, then adding trades one at a time. We would rather show you a small campaign that pays than sell you a large one that hides its waste.

They are usually cheaper per lead and they cannot replace search on their own. Local Services Ads charge per lead, sit above everything else and typically land between $30 and $100 for plumbing, but the volume is capped by your reviews and your screening status. Search reaches the specific job types you want more of. We run both, with the map results from our local SEO team behind them, and let cost per booked job set the split.

Three ways, all boring and all effective. Negative keyword lists written before launch keep out job seekers, parts shoppers and do-it-yourself searches. Call recordings are reviewed so a keyword that produces wrong numbers gets cut rather than optimised. And Local Services Ads leads that were never a real enquiry are disputed every month, which is tedious and usually recovers real money.

Because an emergency visitor has about ten seconds of patience. Each extra second of mobile load time costs roughly 7% of conversions and well-built plumbing pages convert at 12-16%, several times what a general homepage manages. A trade-specific page states the job, the coverage area and the response time with the number fixed to the top of the screen, which lifts results without raising your bids.

Within days of launch, which is exactly why paid search is worth running alongside slower channels. What takes longer is the learning: four to six weeks of data before we can say confidently which keywords book work. With 70-80% of plumbing calls being urgent rather than planned, volume also swings with the weather, so we read performance across a season rather than a fortnight.

Usually yes, if someone competent answers. Around 60% of plumbing emergencies are searched after business hours and those callers are the least price-sensitive you will ever get. But out-of-hours spend with an answering machine on the other end is money burned, so we set the schedule around the hours your team genuinely covers and expand it only when the rota changes.

Not necessarily. We can build campaign landing pages that sit alongside your existing site and leave it untouched, which is the fastest route to a working programme. If the site itself is the bottleneck we will say so and scope it separately with our web design team, rather than quietly charging you for a rebuild you did not ask for.

Tracked numbers per campaign, form attribution, call recordings and an outcome written back from your booking system where it can talk to ours. Those feed one view in our analytics layer so the report ends at booked jobs by trade. Attribution is never perfect and we will show you where the gaps are instead of rounding them away.

Often better than for a large one, because you can be specific. A two-van operation that owns one profitable trade in three towns will beat a regional advertiser spreading a budget thin. There are more than 132,000 plumbing businesses in the US chasing a market forecast at $158.6B by 2029, and precision is how a smaller company competes with a bigger budget.

You keep everything. The ad accounts, the tracking setup, the landing pages and the historical data are in your name from the first week, and we hand over documentation rather than leaving you to reverse-engineer it. We would rather earn the next month than hold your account hostage, and it makes the relationship an easier one to start.

Ask what they report on. An agency that opens with click-through rate and CPC is measuring its own performance; one that opens with revenue per booked job is measuring yours. Then ask who writes the ad copy, whether they have run LSAs for plumbers before, and who owns the account if you leave. Any marketing partner worth hiring will answer all three without hedging, and will show you results from the home service market rather than a generic case study.

Model it from your own pricing rather than an industry promise. The 2026 plumbing benchmark shows an average ticket of $2,208, 41.5% of leads becoming booked jobs and closed return on ad spend of 2.72x. Run those against your own average repair value and close rate and you get a defensible target for the whole programme, which we agree with you before launch rather than discovering afterwards.

Start with the work you want more of and can staff tomorrow. Emergency repair searches convert quickest and keep the vans busy; water heater and repipe work carries far better revenue per job and usually deserves the larger budget once the first trade proves out. Drain cleaning sits in between. We would rather help you win three profitable service lines properly than run thin campaigns across twelve.

No, and running only one is how plumbers end up either broke or invisible. Paid searches buy you the phone ringing this week; organic and the map results lower your blended CPC over years. The two share the same landing content and the same review flow, so we plan them together with our plumbing SEO team and let the cost per booked job decide where the next dollar goes.

A named senior paid media strategist, with a landing page specialist alongside, and the same people stay with the account instead of handing it to a rotating queue. You will know their names, you can email them directly, and the person who built your plan is the person who reviews the numbers with you every month.