Plumber PPC: Costs, Examples + Tips to Get More Customers

PPC for plumbers is a digital marketing strategy to drive traffic and leads to plumbing businesses. You only pay when someone clicks your ad — learn the steps our experts use to get high-quality leads and new customers.

Whether it’s for routine maintenance or an emergency incident, you want to be the first plumbing business local customers call.

Pay-per-click advertising is a highly effective way to reach new customers in need of your plumbing expertise, show off the quality and reliability of your service team, and remind people of the importance of preventative care.

Today, we’re exploring all things PPC for plumbers. Learn why plumbers running paid ads see higher conversion rates than other industries, learn more about the costs, see real-life plumbing PPC ad examples, and improve your paid ads in less than 10 steps.

What is PPC for plumbing companies?

PPC for plumbing companies is a digital advertising strategy where plumbers run online advertisements to attract people searching to find a plumber. These ads show up as sponsored results on Google.

One benefit, PPC advertisers only pay when someone clicks their ad, offering local plumbing businesses more control over their advertising budget.

Business owners use PPC ads to target the perfect local audience at a lower cost than traditional online marketing efforts. This helps them gain new business, find ideal customers in local areas, and drive service requests.

Why is plumber PPC advertising so effective?

PPC for plumbers attracts potential customers searching for plumbing solutions when they’re in-market.

Just think about your typical service call. Clients may find you through word-of-mouth referrals, but increasingly, they find your business through local search (e.g., typing “plumbers near me” in a Google or Bing search).

In fact, 89% of buying journeys begin with a search engine.

Unlike traditional search engine optimization (SEO), which typically takes many months to drive results, PPC is a marketing strategy that’s near instantaneous.

With a little strategy and skill, you can get high-quality ads up and running within a few hours, and start seeing clicks and conversions immediately.

Serving your plumbing ad when a business or resident needs your services drives faster results and higher ROI.

Google estimates businesses make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 they spend on Google Ads, making PPC a highly profitable marketing strategy.

Let’s make the most of your plumbing paid advertising budget by optimizing your ad strategy in eight steps.

How much does PPC for plumbers cost?

On average, plumbers typically invest anywhere from $1,500 to $10,000 each month on PPC ads.

But if you’re aiming for multiple locations, expect to spend upwards of $15,000 monthly. It’s a spectrum that accommodates the solo tradesman and the larger plumbing enterprises.

As for the cost per click, Google ads average between $2 and $5. However, one the most expensive plumber keywords “plumber near me” has a cost per click (CPC) of $22.30:

Note that the price you pay per click isn’t set in stone. It can go beneath your max bid, thanks to variables like your ad’s Quality Score and the keyword competition.

To keep your PPC costs from draining your budget, craft top-notch ads and landing pages. A higher Quality Score can lead to lower CPCs.

“A stellar Google Ads Quality Score could mean you’re paying less per click than a competitor who’s also vying for the same keyword but doesn’t quite measure up in the quality department,” explains Sam Yadegar, CEO at HawkSEM.

“It’s a savvy strategy that’s helped us slash our clients’ cost per conversion by up to 50%.”

Setting clear budget boundaries and regularly reviewing your campaign’s performance ensures your PPC efforts align with your marketing ambitions and financial limits.

So plumbers, ready to turn the PPC valve and let the leads flow? Remember, it’s not just about splashing cash on ads — it’s about smart spending and strategic planning.

8 steps to improve PPC campaign success

How do you optimize your paid ads to reach ideal customers seeking your services in your location?

Improve your PPC marketing in 8 steps to create ads that capture attention and motivate potential customers to request a service call.

1. Define your PPC campaign goal
2. Start with keyword research
3. Write ad copy highlighting common pain points
4. Choose the right imagery
5. Target your ideal customers
6. Set your PPC ad budget
7. Set up conversion tracking
8. Monitor and optimize ads to speed success

Step 1: Define your PPC campaign goal

Google ad campaigns come in different formats, platforms, and audience targeting options to reach your goal.

Keyword here is: goal. Clearly define your campaign goals before considering specifics, like ad copy and creatives.

Perhaps your goal is to increase service calls, drive traffic and leads to your website, or offer a limited-time incentive. Whatever it is, build your campaign strategy with this goal in mind to find the best ways to reach your target audience and measure success.

Step 2: Start with keyword research

Remember, your ad appears when your target audience searches for your solutions or engages in related intent activity.

Your goal is to determine the different keywords they may type into a search engine to find these services.

For example, keyword phrases like “water heater install,” “rusty pipes,” or “clogged sink” all indicate a person is in need of your services.

By targeting these keywords in your campaign, your ad shows when they need you most — increasing the likelihood new customers engage your business.

Step 3: Write ad copy highlighting common pain points

When a potential customer searches for your services, your ad copy must stand out from other plumbers in the area.

Clearly and concisely describe your services, years in business, operating area, incentives or promotions, and what makes your business better than alternatives. Also, incorporate phrases and words from your keyword research.

Speak to plumbing pain points to connect your ad copy to customers’ needs. Emphasize emergency plumbing services to motivate those facing a plumbing crisis and speak to seasonality to remind customers of routine maintenance and drive urgency (e.g., “we’ll winterize your home”).

Most importantly, write a clear call-to-action (e.g., Schedule an Appointment Today), so customers know how to quickly reach out to your business.

Step 4: Choose the right imagery

Many ad types can feature different visual formats, like video or carousel ads.

Keep your imagery simple and focused, to catch attention, stay memorable, and not compete with the important ad copy.

Feature imagery that reflects your customers’ pain points, vendor considerations, or values. For example, a photo of a friendly technician, an industry award, or a quality seal image.

Incorporate positive reviews or testimonials to gain trust and put customers at ease to select your business over others in the plumbing industry.

Step 5: Target your ideal customers

Paid ads offer various ways to target your ideal customers with a compelling offer at an opportune time.

As a plumber, take advantage of four key PPC targeting opportunities:

1. Use geo-targeting to appear in specific locations to tap into your local customer base. Geo-targeting ensures you’re not wasting your advertising budget outside your service area (e.g., advertising your plumbing business in New York City, when you only serve Los Angeles). Take full advantage of those “plumbers near me” local searches.
2. Add ad assets or ad extensions to supply additional compelling details in your ads and target local users. For example, use location extensions to display your business location, sitelink extensions to drive traffic to your seasonal offer web page, or a call asset to add a clickable phone number and make it easier for customers to reach your service team.
3. Try mobile targeting to stay accessible to potential customers searching for plumbing services from their phones. You can adjust bid modifiers to specifically focus on mobile users. Optimize your website or service landing pages to look and work great on smaller screens.
4. Implement remarketing to previous customers or people familiar with your brand. Remarketing is a digital marketing strategy that serves ads across other websites, search, and social media platforms to people who previously visited your website. It’s a highly effective way to re-engage potential customers who already have brand awareness and familiarity with your services in the plumbing industry.

Step 6: Set your PPC ad budget

How much are you willing to spend per PPC campaign to reach the right audience?

This is a personal decision made up of many factors, like your overall marketing budget, business goals, and the number of quality leads you need to grow profitably.

Set a maximum budget to determine how much your cost per click is for each campaign. You can always adjust and optimize later.

Step 7: Set up conversion tracking

Measuring your ad’s performance is key to continuously improving results. Setting up conversion tracking shows which ads get your customers to act — like filling out a service appointment request.

Plus, understanding high-performing ads or keywords can improve underperforming ads to mimic qualities that work best.

Then you could start running similar “winning” ads in other service locations to expand your local strategy and reach new customers.

Step 8: Monitor and optimize ads to speed success

Paid advertising puts you in charge of your ad spend and performance — you’re not pouring money down the drain (pun intended) and hoping it works out.

PPC offers instant measurement of performance metrics, like clickthrough rate and cost-per-click, to inform ways to improve your ad success.

You can even A/B test different ad copies, headlines, and images to quickly learn how customers respond to different treatments and apply that information to other campaigns.

But avoid keywords that lead to unexpected results. For instance, if your ad was displaying for commercial search terms, but you only serve residential homes) or adjust the location, demographic, or device targeting.

With continuous PPC management and optimization, you can move your budget to those ads performing better and turn off ones that aren’t.

At marketing agency HawkSEM, we use ConversionIQ (CIQ) to granularly track every step of the buyer journey. This way, we can understand what aspects of a campaign are working and where we should trim the fat. With these AI-driven insights, we can more efficiently optimize towards a higher ROAS month-over-month (MoM), and year-over-year (YoY).

Tracking with CIQ gives us more insight about the target audience, so we can take that data and use it on another marketing channel (e.g., SEO or social media) to further scale results for our plumbing clients, while maintaining profitability.

4 examples of paid search for plumbers

Let’s take a look at PPC ad examples for real plumbing businesses.

1. Paid search ads for plumbers
2. Plumber YouTube ad examples
3. LinkedIn plumbing PPC example
4. Facebook ads for plumber businesses

1. Paid search ads for plumbers

Paid search ads display your ads at the most opportune time: the moment a person needs and is looking for your services.

The combination of a high-intent searcher, timing, and relevance is key to paid search driving high ROI.

My Plumber is fully exploiting Google’s advertising features and optimization best practices.

The ad image of a friendly service technician captures attention, while the headline offers a compelling incentive and value proposition — $49 plumbing repair, same-day services, and upfront pricing.

My Plumber uses ad extensions to highlight vital information, like its locations, weekly availability, and operating hours.

Our favorite part? My Plumber is optimizing for conversions by linking the Book Now call-to-action directly to a web form. This allows potential customers to book an appointment immediately, without clicking on the website.

2. Plumber YouTube ad examples

YouTube has over 122 million active users daily, and 1 billion hours of content is watched worldwide daily.

Capturing the attention of only a fraction of this audience can be a boon to your plumbing business.

YouTube offers various targeting options and multiple ad formats, including non-skippable in-stream video ads, non-video display ads, and out-stream ads to target mobile devices.

Plumbers Today is leveraging a non-video display ad to tap into Youtube’s huge audience, without investing in video marketing.

Like a paid search ad, Plumbers Today’s ad displays when people search for plumbing-related services.

We love how it’s using geolocation targeting — clicking the ad brings the searcher to a personalized landing page for their city.

Plumbers Today also maximizes every inch of ad space, describing how it helps customers, and its operating hours and low prices.

3. LinkedIn plumbing PPC example

LinkedIn is a great way to get in front of professionals and gain name recognition, so your business is the first on their list to call in a plumbing crisis.

John C. Flood got the memo and fully leveraged LinkedIn’s ad capabilities to showcase its service offering.

We love the punny ad copy – don’t let plumbing problems rain on your parade – and the prominent headline offering an incentive.

Its building urgency by clearly stating the cut off date to receive $75 off its services, while communicating their many years of experience and technical licenses.

Plus, John C. Flood offers multiple ways to get in touch – click directly to receive a quote, visit its website, or call the team directly.

4. Facebook ads for plumber businesses

In April 2023, Facebook had 2.989 billion monthly active users. Plumbers advertising on Facebook gain access to an enormous pool of potential customers who visit the platform to ask peers for service recommendations.

We love this example from Snell Heating and Air Conditioning. The headline and imagery places the compelling offer front and center, while the smiling technician captures scrollers’ attention and puts customers at ease.

The copy has been updated to a seasonal description, and the offer expiration date drives urgency to take advantage of the 20% incentive before time runs out.

Next, let’s dive into why plumbing businesses need digital advertising.

Typical results for investing in plumbing PPC

As you track campaign performance, how do you know how you measure up?

First, benchmark your performance throughout your PPC strategy to see if you’re seeing higher click-through rates to your plumbing website.

Adjust performance as you go, but capture MoM changes in your analytics benchmark report.

If you’ve been running ads for at least a year, you’ll have enough data to measure how your campaigns perform compared to last year (to account for seasonality and other factors).

Also, look at industry benchmarks to compare results against others in your space. With both your YoY and MoM benchmarks, and the industry averages, you’ll have a clear understanding of whether your ads are performing well. Or if you may need to bring in outside help from a plumbing PPC agency.

Average PPC metrics for Home and Home Improvement services:

• Click-through rates — 4.80%
• Cost per click — $6.55.
• Average cost per lead — $66.02
• Average conversion rate — 10.22%

On average, a plumber’s pay-per-click spend to generate qualified leads (who hopefully, turn into repeat customers) is just $66.

Comparatively, a full-page ad in a newspaper can cost anywhere from $2,700 to over $100,000, depending on the publication. Plus, you lack control over who sees it, whether they’re in the market for plumbing services, or if they’re your ideal customer.

Common PPC terms to know

Before using PPC advertising for your plumbing business to generate leads, let’s review common PPC services definitions.

Key pay-per-click definitions:

• • Bid: Your per-ad budget to get people to click on your digital advertisement.
  • Cost per click (CPC): The cost you pay when someone clicks on your ad. (Measured by cost divided by clicks.)
  • Impressions: The number of times your ad displays to an audience.
  • Click-through rate (CTR): An important key performance indicator (KPI) measuring the percentage of people who see your ad and click on it.
  • Conversion Rate: An end-goal metric measuring the percentage of people who convert (e.g., filling out a service request webform on your website).
  • Ad Assets or Ad Extensions: Bonus details and links displayed in your ad to offer additional context and drive clicks to different parts of your website, like business locations, operating hours, and contact information. (Google officially renamed ad extensions “ad assets”, but they’re still largely referred to as ad extensions in the industry).
  • Quality Score: Google’s rating for the relevance and quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages. Google uses the PPC Quality Score to set your CPC and overall ad rank in the Google Ads auction.
  • Return on ad spend (ROAS): Measures revenue earned for each dollar you spend on advertising.

Why HawkSEM is the right agency for your PPC plumbing needs

As a PPC advertising agency, our team at HawkSEM has deep expertise in balancing ad targeting, bidding strategies, relevance, timing, and other optimization strategies to earn the highest return on investment for our plumber clients.

We always take a performance-driven and ROI-centered approach, taking the time to learn about each business, their target audience, and buyer persona to create custom PPC campaigns.

Our approach pays off. By using HawkSEM’s PPC for home services, NorthStock increased its conversions by 53%.

Unlike many competitors, we don’t use software or tools to automate running PPC campaigns. Instead, we run PPC plumbing ads manually, monitor performance, and track them closely to ensure a positive ROAS.

Plus, each PPC campaign has a senior strategist leading the efforts. We deeply believe in prioritizing human intelligence and a personal touch. There’s always a human managing and watching over every marketing campaign. We NEVER leave PPC campaigns on autopilot.

The takeaway

PPC ad campaigns are a cost-effective way to drive customers needing your plumbing services.

By running your ads at the exact moment a customer is searching for them – especially emergency services or local plumber search – you engage new customers more quickly than traditional marketing efforts.

Follow our simple steps to get started running and optimizing your PPC ads. If you need help along the way, reach out to HawkSEM to schedule a free consultation.

We’ll connect you with senior-level PPC optimization experts to build the right campaign strategy, develop compelling ad creative and copy, launch and continuously optimize ads to take over your local service market.