Plumbing is the trade we’ve run the most Google Ads for, by a fair margin, so I’ve got opinions on this one. Some of them I’ve paid for.
If you just want the headline: Google Ads works for plumbers because people search for a plumber at the exact moment something breaks, and they call whoever looks most sorted. In the three plumbing accounts below, October 2026 leads cost between $121 and $152 each, and blocked drain leads in one of them cost about $33. The difference between a good account and an expensive one usually comes down to three things: bidding for leads instead of clicks, giving the urgent jobs their own budget, and tracking that counts every call once.
The rest of this post is the detail, with real numbers from accounts in Melbourne and Brisbane.
Why Google suits plumbing so well
Nobody scrolls Instagram hoping a plumber turns up. They search, usually on their phone, often stressed, sometimes standing in water.
And they search a lot. Across Australia there are about 22,200 searches a month for “plumber near me” and another 8,100 for “emergency plumber” (Semrush, checked 7 November 2026). The demand is already there every day. Google Ads puts you in front of it the same day you switch it on, which is more than you can say for most marketing.
What it costs a plumber in 2026
There are three costs to think about: the clicks, the leads those clicks turn into, and whoever runs the account.
Clicks. In October 2026 the average click in our plumbing accounts ranged from about $17 for blocked drain searches in Brisbane up to $66 for broad “plumber” searches in the same city. Semrush puts a click on “emergency plumber” at around $17. Yes, that’s a lot per click. It’s also why the account has to be set up to buy phone calls rather than visits.
Leads. This is the number I’d actually watch. Here’s October 2026 across three accounts we run:
| Business | Ad spend (October) | Leads (October) | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Melbourne Drains & Plumbing | $17,229 | 142 | $121 |
| Uplumb, Brisbane (first full month) | $9,331 | 63 | $148 |
| Master Plumber Services, Melbourne | $7,927 | 52 | $152 |
Inside Uplumb’s account the picture is even more interesting. Blocked drains came in at about $32 a lead in October, while general plumbing searches cost about $340 a lead. Same business, same month, ten times the difference. That’s the whole argument for structuring the account properly, in one line.
Management. Agencies charge in all sorts of ways. Ours is a flat fee from $2,000 a month plus ad spend, month to month, and the account sits in your name. There’s more on what the different fee models mean for you in Google Ads cost in Australia.
How we set up a plumbing account
Split out the urgent jobs, but don’t split everything
This is where most plumbing accounts go wrong, and they go wrong in two opposite directions.
Uplumb started with one campaign for everything, which is a reasonable place to start with a new business. For the first three weeks it cost $403 a lead, because the broad searches ate the budget before the blocked drain searches got a look in. Once blocked drains and hot water had their own campaigns, the cost per lead fell to $107 over the next three weeks.
Master Plumber Services had the opposite problem. When we took the account on in August it was running five separate campaigns off one budget, and leads were costing $920 each. We folded them into one search campaign and gave only roofing its own, because roofing searches behave differently to everything else. By October, leads cost $152.
So the rule we use is this: give a type of job its own campaign when it behaves differently, in price, in urgency or in who’s searching. Otherwise keep it together, so the bidding has enough data to learn from. Five campaigns sharing $250 a day is five campaigns that never learn anything.
Bid for leads, not clicks
All five of Master Plumber Services’ August campaigns were set to Maximise Clicks. That setting does exactly what it says. It buys as many clicks as it can and has no idea whether anyone rang. Once the tracking is right, change it to bid for conversions. This one takes about two minutes and I’ve seen it change an account more than anything else on this list.
Get the map right
Target the suburbs you’re happy to drive to, and set the location targeting to people who are actually in those areas. Google’s default setting also shows your ads to people who are merely “interested in” your area, which for a plumber mostly means paying for clicks from the other side of town, or the other side of the country. Google explains the two options in target ads to geographic locations.
Keep the junk out
Check the search terms report every week, without fail. Plumbing accounts attract a steady trickle of people who were never going to be customers: DIY searches like “how to unblock a toilet yourself”, job hunters looking for plumbing apprenticeships, and suppliers. Each of those clicks costs the same as a real customer’s. Add them as negative keywords as you find them.
The landing page does half the work
Sending ad traffic to your homepage is the most common waste of money I see in plumbing accounts, and it’s an easy fix. Someone searching “blocked drain Coburg” wants to see blocked drains, Coburg, and a phone number they can tap. They don’t want your company history and a slideshow.
Our plumbing landing pages usually have:
- The job in the headline and the area underneath it
- A tap-to-call number at the top, then again every screen or so
- Real Google reviews with names on them
- Your licence number and whatever guarantee you offer
- Photos of your van and your team, not stock photos of pipes
The difference this makes is not small. SEQ Blocked Drains went from about 5% of visitors getting in touch to more than 30% after a landing page rebuild, on the same ads. That story is in the SEQ Blocked Drains case study, and we’ve put the wider numbers together in what’s a good website conversion rate.
Track calls, because that’s how plumbers get booked
Most plumbing leads are phone calls, not forms. If your tracking only counts forms, Google is learning from a small fraction of your customers and bidding accordingly.
Set up call tracking for calls from the ads and for calls from the website, and make sure each enquiry is counted once. Then check what’s actually being counted. We’ve opened accounts where every form was counted twice, so the report showed half again as many leads as the phone and the inbox did. It happens more than you’d think, and it makes every other number in the account wrong.
The mistakes I see most
- Maximise Clicks bidding on an account that’s meant to make the phone ring.
- One campaign for everything, so the expensive broad searches eat the budget.
- Too many campaigns on a small budget, so none of them learn.
- Believing cheap conversions. In June, one plumbing account’s Performance Max campaign reported 103 conversions for $2,916. If a campaign claims leads at a fraction of the usual price, check them against your job book before you give it more money. We wrote this up in Performance Max: what Google won’t tell you.
- Nobody answering the phone. The ads can’t fix a missed call at 7pm, and it’s one of the most common reasons a decent account looks like it isn’t working.
I’ll add one thing agencies don’t usually say. Google Ads doesn’t work for every plumber. Just last week I paused a plumbing client’s ads because they weren’t bringing in enough calls to justify what he was spending, and I’d rather tell someone that than keep taking the fee. It doesn’t happen often, but if your area, your prices or your phone handling aren’t right, more ad spend won’t fix it.
Questions plumbers ask me
How much should a plumber spend on Google Ads?
The three accounts above spent between about $7,900 and $17,200 in October, and each of those budgets was set from what a job is worth to that business. Work out what a booked job is worth to you and what share of leads you win, and set a budget from that rather than from a round number. We show the sum in cost per lead vs cost per booked job.
Is Google Ads better than hipages?
They’re different things. A Google Ads lead comes to you and only you, and the account, the data and the reviews you build stay with your business. hipages sells the same lead to several plumbers. We compare the options in marketing for tradies.
How long until I get leads?
Usually in the first week, but expect the first two to three weeks to cost more while the account learns. Uplumb’s first three weeks cost $403 a lead. The three weeks after the fix cost $107. Judging an account in week one is like judging an apprentice on his first day.
Can I run it myself?
You can. If you’re spending under about $3,000 a month, it’s often worth learning, at least for a while. Start with our guide to auditing your own Google Ads account, which will show you where the money’s going now.
Want a second pair of eyes on your account?
Get in touch and bring your last three months of numbers. I’ll tell you what a lead should cost in your area, where the spend is leaking, and what I’d fix first, whether or not we end up working together. Here’s how we run Google Ads, and the full stories behind the numbers above: Master Plumber Services, Uplumb and Melbourne Drains & Plumbing.
