Paid Search for Plumbers
If paid search was designed for one trade, it was probably yours.
Why it works so well here
Paid advertising works best when three things are true: the need is urgent, the decision is fast, and the customer will pay a premium for someone who turns up now.
Emergency plumbing is all three at once. Someone with water coming through a ceiling isn’t comparing six quotes. They’re ringing the first number that looks credible and available, and they’re not haggling. That’s about as good as paid search gets in any industry.
It also solves the one problem SEO can’t. Ranking organically and in the map pack takes months. An ad campaign can be live this afternoon. For a plumber who’s just gone out on their own, or who’s moved area, or who’s suddenly got a quiet fortnight, that speed is worth real money.
The catch is cost. Emergency plumbing clicks are among the more expensive in the trades, because everyone knows they convert. So the whole game is making sure you’re only paying for the clicks that turn into jobs, and that’s mostly about discipline rather than budget.
What actually works
Call-only ads. Someone in a panic doesn’t want a landing page. They want a button that rings you. Call-only formats skip the website entirely and convert far better for emergency work.
Dayparting. Run ads when you can actually answer. Paying for a click at 2am when the phone goes to voicemail is paying for a bad review. Most plumbers should be running heavier in evenings and weekends, when competitors have stopped and prices soften.
Tight geography. A radius you’d genuinely travel, not the whole county. Clicks from forty minutes away either don’t convert or convert into jobs that aren’t worth the drive.
Negative keywords, aggressively. “How to”, “DIY”, “parts”, “training”, “jobs”, “salary”. Without these you’ll pay for a lot of people who are never going to hire anyone.
Separate campaigns for emergency and planned. Bathrooms and boilers behave completely differently — longer consideration, landing pages rather than call buttons, different bids. Mixing them makes both worse.
What we’d actually do
Start with emergency, because it converts immediately and pays for itself fastest. Call-only ads, tight radius, dayparted to when you answer, with a heavy negative keyword list from day one.
Set the budget deliberately low to begin with. We’d rather prove the cost per job on £15 a day than discover it on £60.
Then track calls properly — not clicks, not impressions, calls that lasted long enough to be a real job. That’s the only number that matters and most plumbers have never seen it.
Once emergency is producing predictably, build the second campaign for boilers and bathrooms. Landing pages, longer consideration, remarketing to people who visited and didn’t call.
Then keep pruning. Paid campaigns decay — search terms drift, competitors change bids, costs creep. The maintenance is most of the value.
The first 90 days
Weeks one to two. Emergency call-only campaign live at around £15 a day, dayparted to evenings and weekends, tight radius, heavy negatives. Call tracking in place before a single click is bought — otherwise you’re guessing.
Weeks three to four. First real data. We’d expect to be cutting search terms aggressively at this point; the initial negative list never catches everything and the first month always reveals a few expensive surprises.
Month two. Cost per booked job should be settling into a range. For a plumber this normally lands well inside profitability on emergency work. If it hasn’t by the end of month two, the problem is targeting or answer rate, and we’d fix that before spending more.
Month three. If emergency is working, scale it — but only as far as your capacity goes. There’s no point buying calls you can’t attend. Then build the second campaign for boilers and bathrooms, which needs landing pages and behaves on a longer timescale.
The thing we’d watch hardest throughout is your answer rate. A plumber running ads with a 70% answer rate is setting fire to a third of the budget, and it’s the most common reason these campaigns underperform. Sort that first and the rest tends to follow.
What good looks like
Cost per call under a quarter of your average job value, ideally less. At £840 average that gives you room, but emergency jobs are your smaller ones so we’d watch it against the £215–£235 end.
Answer rate above 90%. A missed call is a wasted click and you’ve paid full price for it.
Emergency campaign profitable within the first month. If it isn’t, something is wrong with the targeting rather than the budget.
Planned-work campaign judged over three months, because bathroom decisions take weeks.
The mistakes we see most
Running ads you can’t answer. The single most expensive error. Paying for calls that go to voicemail is worse than not advertising.
No negative keywords. You’ll fund a lot of DIY research.
Radius set too wide. Cheap-looking clicks, expensive-looking drives.
Sending emergency traffic to a homepage. Every extra tap loses people.
Judging on clicks. Clicks are a cost, not a result. Calls are the result.
Leaving it running unattended. Costs creep and search terms drift. An unmanaged campaign gets worse every month.
What’s it worth?
Average job £840 · cost per booked job £30
Every £30 spent returns £840. The maths only stops working if you can’t answer the phone.
Every call lands in Gaffer
Calls log against the customer automatically, so you can see which ads produce jobs rather than just calls. Repeat callers aren’t strangers. And review requests fire after completion, which builds the map pack position that eventually reduces how much you need to spend on ads at all.
Questions plumbers ask
How much should I start with?
Fifteen to twenty pounds a day, on emergency only. Prove the cost per job, then scale.
Ad spend on top of your fee?
Always, and always in your own account. You own it, you see every penny, and you can switch it off whenever you like.
Won’t SEO be cheaper long term?
Yes. Run both — ads for now, organic for later. Ads are how you eat while the slow work matures.
What if I’m already busy?
Turn it off. That’s the advantage of paid over everything else on this list.
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