Lead Generation for Plumbers
Emergency is the one place bought leads work, if you know your cost per job
Why your trade is the exception
A bathroom refit is £1,850. A boiler replacement, £1,670. A shower installation, £840. A leak repair, £235. A blocked drain, £215.
On most of this site the advice about paid lead platforms is cautious, because shared leads on considered purchases turn into price comparisons.
Emergency plumbing is different, for three specific reasons.
The decision is made on speed, not on price. Somebody with water coming through a ceiling books whoever can attend. A shared lead is far less damaging when the winner is decided by who rang back first rather than by who was cheapest.
The jobs are small and frequent. At £215 to £235 a callout, a lead costing a few pounds can pay for itself immediately rather than needing a large conversion to justify it.
The work leads somewhere. An emergency customer becomes a boiler customer, a bathroom customer and an annual service customer if anything is done to keep them. The first job is not where the value ends.
So bought leads are genuinely viable here. The question is not whether to use them but whether you know what they actually cost you — and almost no plumber does.
The number that decides it
Cost per lead is not the number. Cost per job is, and cost per customer is better still.
Work it through. Ten leads at £8 each is £80. If four of those convert — a reasonable rate on emergency work if you answer quickly — that is £20 per job. Against a £215 callout that is comfortable.
Now change one variable. If you answer half of them within ten minutes and the rest the next day, conversion falls to two, cost per job doubles to £40, and the margin on a small callout starts looking thin. Change the mix so the leads are mostly planned bathroom enquiries shared four ways, and conversion falls again while the sales effort rises.
The same platform, the same spend, and a completely different verdict depending on your answer rate and the job mix. Which is why this cannot be decided by reputation or by what somebody said in a merchant’s. It has to be measured, and the measurement is straightforward once enquiries are tracked to their source.
The ratio
A boiler is £1,670. Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. One boiler replacement covers nearly five years.
On lead spend: at £20 per job on emergency work, a hundred bought jobs a year is £2,000 for roughly £22,000 of callout revenue, before anything those customers go on to buy. That is a defensible channel. At £60 a job with poor answer rates it is a much closer call, and the difference is operational rather than commercial.
What we’d actually build
Source tracking on every enquiry, so cost per job by channel is a number rather than an argument.
An answer-rate fix first, because bought leads amplify whatever your response looks like. Paying for leads you do not answer is the most expensive mistake available here.
Channel-by-channel economics — platforms, directories, search, van, magnets, recommendation — compared on cost per job rather than volume.
A follow-on system, so an emergency customer bought once becomes a service and replacement customer without being bought again.
A local referral set — letting agents, estate agents, property maintenance firms and kitchen and bathroom retailers — which produces unshared work alongside the paid channel.
A cut-off rule, so a channel that stops performing is stopped rather than tolerated.
What good looks like at twelve months
- Cost per job known for every channel you use
- Answer rate above ninety per cent in working hours, so bought leads convert
- Emergency customers entering a follow-on sequence rather than disappearing
- Two or three referral relationships producing unshared enquiries
- Spend concentrated in whatever is actually working
The mistakes we see most
Buying leads with a poor answer rate. It is paying for enquiries and then not turning up to them.
Measuring cost per lead. It tells you almost nothing. Cost per job and cost per customer tell you everything.
Treating an emergency customer as one job. The callout is the acquisition; the boiler is the return.
Staying on a platform out of habit. Channels decay. Without tracking you will not notice for a year.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. Source tracking live and the answer rate measured, because both are prerequisites for judging anything else.
Weeks 5–8. Channel economics compared properly, with spend adjusted on the evidence.
Weeks 9–12. The follow-on sequence for bought customers, plus two or three local referral relationships started.
At ninety days the measure is cost per job by channel. Once that exists, every decision on this page makes itself.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Enquiries carry their source, so cost per job by channel is a report rather than a spreadsheet exercise.
Because jobs record attendance and response times, you can see whether a channel is underperforming or whether the answer rate is the problem — which is usually the real answer.
And an emergency job that opens a boiler quote and an annual service schedule shows the true value of a bought customer rather than only the first invoice.
Your profile inside the platform is the lead source
If you do use paid platforms, there is a second layer most plumbers ignore entirely, and it decides how much you pay for the same work as everybody else.
The platforms are marketplaces, and marketplaces rank. Your position in a homeowner’s list of suggested tradespeople is determined by a mix of rating, review count, response time, completion rate and how long you have been on it. A firm at the top of that list receives more enquiries at the same cost per lead than a firm halfway down — which means the effective cost per job for two plumbers paying identical prices can differ by a factor of two or three.
That makes the profile itself a marketing asset, and it is maintained the same way any other is. Reviews requested consistently rather than occasionally, because volume and recency both count. Response times kept genuinely fast, since most platforms measure it and some display it. Job categories and coverage area set accurately, so you are not paying for enquiries you would never take. Photographs of real work rather than stock images. And a written profile that says what you actually do rather than repeating the same four sentences every other plumber has used.
None of that costs anything beyond attention, and it directly reduces cost per job on a channel you are already paying for. If you are spending two or three thousand pounds a year on leads, an afternoon on the profile is the highest-return hour in this whole page.
Questions plumbers ask
Which platform is best? The one that produces the lowest cost per job for your mix, which is not the same answer for two plumbers in the same town.
Should I buy planned-work leads too? They behave like every other considered purchase and convert on comparison rather than speed. Test them separately and judge them separately.
How fast do I need to be? Minutes, not hours. Bought emergency leads reward the first credible response.
When should I stop a channel? When cost per job exceeds what the work is worth to you, measured over a quarter rather than a bad fortnight.
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