Choosing a plumber PPC company

Agencies with a verified published price

How to compare plumber PPC companies

1. Insist the ad account stays yours. Open the Google Ads account under your own billing and grant the agency manager access, rather than letting them run you inside their account. If the account is theirs, the conversion history, the negative keyword list and the campaign structure you paid to build do not leave with you, and switching provider means starting from zero learning.
2. Check conversion tracking before anything else. Ask how calls, form fills and booked jobs are tracked, and whether call conversions are counted only past a minimum duration so that wrong numbers and hang-ups do not read as leads. Google documents conversion tracking setup for exactly this. A provider optimising on unfiltered call counts is optimising toward noise.
3. Ask what they do with the search terms report. Emergency plumbing ads attract enormous irrelevant traffic: people looking for DIY instructions, parts, jobs at your company, and competitors' brand names. Ask how often they review actual search terms and prune negatives, and ask to see the negative keyword list from another account. It is the clearest sign of whether anyone is actually working the account.
4. Separate emergency from planned work. Burst pipes and bathroom remodels are different buyers with different economics, budgets, hours and landing pages. A single campaign mixing them lets cheap clicks on planned work drain the budget that should be live at two in the morning. Ask a candidate to describe how they would split the account and schedule it.

What drives cost per lead in plumbing search

Three things set the number. Auction competition is the first: in a dense metro, several plumbing companies plus national franchises plus lead resellers are all bidding on the same emergency terms, and lead resellers can pay more per click than you can because they sell the same lead several times. Second is quality, which in Google's system is measured through expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience, and which affects both the price paid and whether ads show at all. A provider who has never talked to you about your landing page is managing half the account.

Third is what happens after the click, which is not the agency's software but is still their problem to raise. Emergency search callers rarely leave a voicemail and rarely wait. If calls ring out after hours, the spend that generated them is wasted regardless of how well the campaign was built. Ask any candidate what they expect your answer rate to be, whether they will report on it, and whether they will pause campaigns during hours nobody is answering. A provider who will not discuss intake is quietly outsourcing the part of the funnel that determines whether the account works.

How a plumbing account should be structured

Expect campaigns split by job economics and urgency rather than by keyword theme alone. Emergency terms need broad hours coverage, aggressive bidding, call-focused ad formats and location extensions. High-ticket planned work, such as repiping, water heater replacement or sewer line repair, justifies its own campaign with landing pages that answer questions and capture enquiries that convert over days rather than minutes. Brand terms belong in their own campaign so that competitor bidding on your name is visible and cheap to defend.

Geography deserves the same discipline. Radius targeting around your yard is the crude version, and it wastes budget on jobs across the metro that are unprofitable once drive time is counted. A provider who asks which ZIP codes your best jobs come from, and who checks that against the location report rather than assuming, is doing the analysis you are paying for. Ask to see the location performance breakdown from another account, redacted, and check whether bids differ by area or the same number appears everywhere.

The evidence to gather before you sign

Ask for two named clients in home services you may contact, and ask those clients what happened in the first sixty days, not what the results look like now. Ask for a disclosed monthly management fee and how it is calculated, since a percentage of spend and a flat fee create different incentives and the percentage model rewards spending more rather than spending better. Ask what the minimum sensible monthly ad budget is for your market and be suspicious of a candidate who says any budget works.

Get the reporting cadence and content agreed in writing: spend, calls, qualified calls, booked jobs, cost per booked job and the search terms actioned. Reporting that stops at clicks and impressions is not accountable to anything you care about. Finally, read the exit clause. The account, the conversion history, the creative and the call tracking numbers should transfer to you, and a provider confident in the work will put that in the contract without argument.

Questions people actually ask

How much should a plumbing company spend on search ads?

Enough to compete for the hours you can actually service, which depends on your metro's click prices and your capacity. Work backwards instead: decide what a booked job is worth, estimate how many clicks convert to a call and how many calls to a job, and check whether the resulting cost per job leaves margin. A provider who cannot do that arithmetic with you is guessing.

Should the agency own the Google Ads account?

No. Open it under your own billing and grant the agency manager access. The conversion history and negative keyword lists you paid to build are the account's real value, and if the account belongs to the agency, none of it travels with you when the relationship ends.

Flat fee or percentage of ad spend?

Both are used, and each creates a different incentive. A percentage rewards increasing spend, a flat fee rewards efficiency but can leave a large account under-serviced. What matters more is that the fee is disclosed, the hours behind it are described, and the reporting shows cost per booked job rather than cost per click.

Are Local Services Ads a substitute for search ads?

They are a different product with its own screening and pay-per-lead pricing, and many plumbers run both. Ask a candidate whether they manage both, how they split budget between them, and how they judge which channel produced a given booking, since the two frequently overlap on the same query.

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