A guide to tackle questions around budget, ROI, what to look out for, calculators, & guide rails to scale with google ads.
Google Ads can be a game-changer for plumbing businesses looking to drive high-quality leads. Yet, many plumbers find ad campaigns costly without seeing a strong return on investment (ROI). The good news is that by understanding some foundational principles and following best practices, you can make every dollar work toward generating more customers. In this guide, I’ll walk you through budgeting, choosing the right keywords, writing effective ad copy, and optimizing your ads to maximize profits.
TLDR: Find your CPC for the keywords you’re targeting—it’s typically $20–$40. Then optimize your landing pages and ad sets to achieve a 10% conversion rate. Understand your book/set/close rate. Know how much a customer is worth to you and whether repeat business justifies the high cost of Google Ads. Turn on tCPA only after you achieve 30 conversions. Expect to pay $1,400–$2,800 per week for 70 clicks.
Google Ads provides an unparalleled opportunity for plumbing businesses due to the high-intent nature of search traffic. When someone searches for a plumber, they’re often dealing with a plumbing emergency, making them highly motivated to call. Google Ads effectively targets these local audiences who need immediate help, driving qualified leads directly to your business. Since these customers are ready-to-buy, they’re also expensive.
Before diving into setup, it’s essential to define your goals. Are you focused on generating more phone calls, form submissions, or website visits? Setting clear goals aligns your ad strategy with your business objectives—whether you’re trying to increase monthly call volume or build brand awareness.
Hint: You want more phone calls.
Profitable advertising starts with setting a realistic budget. An initial budget should provide enough room for testing while remaining manageable for your business. For most plumbing businesses, supporting at least 70 clicks per week over three months will generate meaningful data. That’s 280 clicks per month for three months. This volume allows your account to make data-driven decisions to find customers likely to convert.
Use Google’s Keyword Planner: Look up 10–15 common keywords you want to rank for. Ensure you’ve set the correct location.Calculate CPC: Determine the low and high cost-per-click (CPC) for each keyword. Find the median cost of each keyword phrase, then average these medians. Multiply the result by 840 (the total clicks for three months). This gives you a three-month budget estimate.
Example:
Local plumber near me
Repeat this for each keyword:
Average CPC:
($51.31 + $87.50 + $61.78 + $60.90) ÷ 4 = $65.37
Budget estimate for 840 clicks:
$65.37 × 840 = $54,910.80 (over three months).
This shocking figure emphasizes the importance of high conversion rates to make your investment worthwhile.
Understanding your CAC, Average Order Value (AOV), and LTV is essential for setting an effective budget. For new plumbing companies, margins after labor, materials, and advertising may be slim due to rising ad costs. Knowing your customer’s LTV can help justify the initial investment in acquiring them. Alternatively, you may need to raise prices to increase your AOV. Tools like House Call Pro or Service Titan can provide these metrics.
Bottom line: Knowing how much money you need to make from Google Ads to sustain this is a long term strategy.
Keywords are the foundation of any successful Google Ads campaign. Understanding user intent behind these keywords is critical. Focus on transactional keywords—search terms that indicate an immediate need—such as “emergency plumber” or “leaking pipe repair.” These high-intent keywords target users ready to hire a plumber, ensuring your ads connect with the right audience.
Keywords like “24-hour plumber near me” or “[City] drain cleaning service” often drive the best results for plumbing businesses. Including local modifiers like city names or “near me” makes your ads more relevant to your area and boosts clicks from customers seeking local services.
Here are some essential tips:
Here’s a list of keywords we recommend. We avoid using broad match keywords in the beginning as Google doesn’t use your budget efficiently and gets you a lot of garbage clicks. Stick to exclusively phrase match or phrase match+exact match.
Segment keywords into ‘ad groups’. Keywords relating to water heater repairs/installs should be grouped together. Then keywords relating to drain cleaning should be grouped together. This will be important to have handy when we start creating ad groups.
Negative keywords filter out unrelated search queries, preventing your ads from appearing in searches that won’t generate leads. For instance, exclude terms like “DIY plumbing” or “plumbing courses” to focus your budget on potential customers. Continuously review search terms and add irrelevant ones to your negative keyword list. We have a list of negative keywords to get started at the bottom of this document.
A well-structured campaign ensures efficiency and scalability. Start with one campaign that includes multiple ad groups for different services. Only create additional campaigns if you offer significantly different services, like plumbing and remodeling. We are trying to gather as much data to feed into your online-conversion-machine and when you ad an additional campaign, you are spreading out your budget so that you can accrue good data.
Setup your campaign objective as leads, then create a search campaign (only), then the goals of phone calls & lead forms submissions.
Starting with a new campaign, select a bid strategy that gives you control over costs. I recommend using manual cost-per-click (CPC) initially to carefully manage your budget. This allows you to adjust your bids based on early performance and make informed decisions about future ad spend. You need to have 30 conversions before you can switch to Target Cost Per Action, which is where Google will try to keep your cost per call within a specific amount.
This is great for being able to scale profitably and reliably. Unfortunately, you shouldn’t start out like this though because Google needs enough data to know how many clicks = a conversion (call).
Turn Google Display Network Off
Set Your Budget.
We defined your daily budget earlier in this article. You will not be able to turn on manual CPC until you finish setting up your first campaign. After you have finished setting up your campaigns and ad groups, you can go back into the settings and change your bid setting to Manual CPC
Set your daily budget.
Then click on manual CPC.
Then click through to your ad groups, you will be able to set your max click cost. You want to set this at the average cpc you found earlier in this article. Do this for each ad group.
Set your ads to target the specific cities and neighborhoods you serve. Use the “presence” option to focus on users physically located in your service area, avoiding wasted spend on users outside your target market.
Make sure for this setting that you have presence turned on. Do not check presence or interests. This will show your ad to people who don’t live in the area you serve. DO NOT CHECK PRESENCE OR INTERESTS.
Title your first ad group and plug in the keywords you did in your research.
A compelling headline grabs attention and communicates urgency. Include specific services and location details, like:
Don’t get cute here, write the content in a direct way. Lay out the value propositions in a clear & concise manner.
Your ad descriptions should highlight what makes your plumbing services unique, such as satisfaction guarantees, licensed technicians, or fast response times. Using trust-centered language—words like “licensed,” “certified,” and “guaranteed”—can reassure potential clients, increasing the chance they’ll reach out.
Ad extensions (like call buttons, location details, and customer reviews) add credibility and increase conversions by making it easier for users to take immediate action. Also they make your ad huge, taking up way more real estate from your competitors.
You must have tracking on for PPC ads to work. The conversions your account gets feeds you better & more cost effective leads. This means that if you’re feeding your google ad account false conversions, google will think it’s doing a good job and do more of what it thinks is working. That’s like if you were told ice cream & candy for dinner will make you stronger so you kept ate even more of it. You don’t want that.
Conversion tracking is essential for measuring the effectiveness of your ads. Whether tracking phone calls, form submissions, or purchases, these metrics give you insight into how ads contribute to your bottom line. Google Analytics further enriches your understanding of user behavior, allowing you to track beyond clicks and see how leads engage with your website.
To track lead forms, here’s a guide on how to do that:
To track phone calls, use dynamic swap.
Now that you’ve done it once, you will need to do it again! Repeat this process for each ad set that you have.
Create multiple ad groups for different services that you provide. You want to match the user’s experience from their search, to the ad they see, to the copy on your landing page. The better you’re able to match their need & provide value, the higher your conversion rate will go. This means you will need to create multiple landing pages for different services. Unless you want to waste your money, then you can just use your homepage website and watch your conversion rate tank.
To avoid wasted spend, set your keyword match types to exact or phrase match, which target high-intent users. This way, your budget focuses only on potential customers searching for specific services, rather than broad searches that may not convert.
This is where micromanaging actually can help. Look over the search terms your keywords are actually showing up for and add negative keywords for all of the terms that aren’t buying keywords. These often look like people searching for DIY articles or people looking for jobs. These don’t make you money.
Below is an example of some keywords we would want to add to the negative keyword list. These phrases are not looking for what my client is selling. Therefore, it should be added to the negative keyword list so we don’t waste more money on those terms.
Turn on target cost per action once you have 30 conversions. Set your target to be slightly below your current CPA. This means that if your average CPA of your 30 conversions is $250, set your tCPA to $210. Continue this for as long as possible until you see a significant dip in lead volume. At a 10% conversion rate, you will need ~300 clicks to switch to tCPA.
This is how you know you made it! Congratulations.
Regularly test different ad versions to see which performs best. A/B testing lets you compare ad elements—such as headlines and descriptions—and see what resonates most with your audience. Monitoring performance metrics such as click-through rate and conversion rate can help you refine your messaging and targeting.
Scheduling ads during peak hours can make a big difference. By analyzing your data to find the hours with the most searches or calls, you can schedule your ads to appear when potential customers are most active, making your spend more effective. To get started, just set your business hours as your ad schedule.
You can find this within Audiences, keywords, and content tab under ad schedule.
To gauge campaign success, track metrics like click-through rate (CTR), conversion rate, and cost-per-click (CPC). These indicators reveal if your ads are reaching and engaging the right audience. Consistently monitoring these KPIs helps identify areas to improve or reallocate budget.
Here are some benchmarks:
Profitability is essential. Use a calculator to estimate how many conversions are needed to reach a profit. For instance, if your cpc is around $20 and your Conversion Rate (CVR%) is 10%, then your cost per phone call is $200. If you turn 50% of phone calls into paying customers, that means your CAC is $400. These calculations help you assess if your current budget is sustainable.
As data accumulates, adjust your bids, ad groups, and targeting based on performance. Reallocate budget from underperforming areas to ad groups that bring in leads consistently. Regularly optimizing ensures that your campaigns remain efficient and cost-effective. Once you see results, consider making new ad groups & landing pages.
Retargeting allows you to reconnect with users who previously visited your website but didn’t convert. Setting up retargeting campaigns in Google Ads can be beneficial for maintenance services or seasonal promotions, keeping your business top-of-mind for those needing plumbing help later.
While Google Ads is effective, combining it with SEO offers sustainable growth. Optimize your Google My Business profile, encourage customer reviews, and consider blogging for long-term visibility. These organic efforts build credibility and increase your chances of appearing in both paid and organic search results.
You shouldn’t even consider doing PPC ads until you have about 50 reviews on your google business profile, a good looking website, have local service ads on, & have a reliable process to turn phone calls into customers.
Setting up profitable Google Ads for plumbing doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By setting clear goals, budgeting wisely, selecting the right keywords, and consistently monitoring results, you can create a Google Ads strategy that delivers returns. Start small, test your approach, and don’t hesitate to seek expert help if needed. When done right, Google Ads can be a valuable tool for growing your plumbing business.
