The Plumber’s Complete Guide To Google Search Ads

Wondering how you can generate high quality leads for your plumbing business through Google Search Advertising?

Well, we understand that you have a business to run, so we’ve created this complete guide covering the fundamentals for how you can create and run successful Google Ads campaigns for your plumbing business.

This guide will teach you how to leverage the power of Google Search Ads to build an affordable, predictable way to generate leads that become appointments booked in your calendar.

What are Google Search Ads and How Do They Work?

To start, it would be a good idea to first clarify what a Search Ad on Google really is.

Google Search Ads are essentially paid ads that appear at the top of Google search results pages when users enter specific queries. Search ads contain a small “Sponsored” label at the top, to help you distinguish a paid ad vs an organic result.

These ads are designed to show up in response to queries that are directly relevant to the services or products a business offers.

For plumbers, this means that when someone searches for terms like “emergency plumber near me” or “pipe repair”, your ad can appear at the very top of the search results, making it more likely for potential customers to click on your ad.

How Google Search Ads Work

When a user types a query into Google’s search engine, the search ads that appear at the top are triggered by an auction system. This auction isn’t just about who spends the most but about several factors, including:

The relevance of your ad – Google assesses how closely your ad matches the search intent behind a user’s query.
Your bid amount – You can set a maximum bid for how much you’re willing to pay per click (this is called cost-per-click or CPC).
Your Ad Quality Score – Google looks at the relevance and quality of your ad, your website, and your landing page to determine how useful your ad is to the searcher.

Put simply, Google Search Ads help you pay for visibility on the world’s most popular search engine. The better optimized your ad and the more relevant it is to what people are searching for, the more likely it will show up in the top positions.

The Advantages of Google Search Advertising for Plumbers

Target High-Intent Customers

One of the biggest advantages of Google Search Ads is that they reach people who are already actively searching for plumbing services. These users have a clear intent to hire a plumber, whether for an emergency repair or routine maintenance.

By bidding on relevant keywords like “emergency plumber near me” or “water heater repair,” you’re able to place your business in front of people who are most likely to convert into customers.

With search ads, you’re not interrupting people with ads when they aren’t interested. Instead, you’re placing your business in front of people who need plumbing services right now, increasing your chances of securing leads that convert into appointments.

Control Over Budget and Costs

Google Search Ads operate on a pay-per-click (PPC) model, meaning you only pay when someone actually clicks on your ad.

This allows you to set a budget that works for your business, whether you’re a small local plumber or a larger company with multiple service areas. You can adjust your daily spend or pause campaigns at any time, giving you complete control over how much you spend.

Highly Targeted Local Advertising

For plumbers, targeting the right geographic area is crucial. Google Search Ads allow you to pinpoint specific locations in your service area. You can also target mobile users, which is important since many customers search for plumbing services on their phones during emergencies.

You can also ensure that your ads only appear for people in the areas you serve, maximizing the return on your ad spend and minimizing wasted clicks from people outside your service area.

Immediate Results Compared to SEO

Building a strong organic search presence through SEO takes time, sometimes months or even years. However, with Google Search Ads, you can get immediate visibility. From the moment your campaign goes live, your ads can start showing up in search results, bringing in potential leads right away.

This is especially important for emergency plumbing services, where customers are unlikely to spend time scrolling through organic results. Google Search Ads let you bypass the wait time of SEO and appear in front of customers when they need a plumber urgently.

Outperform Competitors

Chances are, your competitors are already using Google Search Ads. If you’re not running ads, you’re likely missing out on high-quality leads to businesses that are showing up at the top of search results.

By running well-targeted ads, you can compete head-to-head with other local plumbers and outperform them by creating more relevant, compelling ads that address customers’ needs.

Google Ads Solve The Biggest Challenges Faced by Plumbing Businesses

As a business owner, you know that running a plumbing business comes with its own unique set of challenges—such as getting consistent leads, dealing with emergencies, managing a budget, and competing with other local plumbers. Google Ads provide powerful solutions to many of these common pain points including the 3 that we see most often:

Low Customer Retention
1. Solution: A consistent and reliable flow of new leads will help alleviate the stress and pressure of poor customer retention while you look to improve potential causes to the issue.
High Competition
1. Solution: Google Ads give the little guy a chance in a highly competitive market. We harness the power of Google Search to increase your brand visibility and ensure your business shows up above your competitors!
Messy Customer Acquisition
1. Solution: Our primary goal is to generate a consistent flow of high-intent, quality leads who are ready to buy your service. We’ll help to create a ‘filter’ for your sales funnel and streamline your customer acquisition.

Step By Step Guide to Running a Successful Search Campaign

Step 1: Establish a budget for your campaign

Utilize keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner (free) or Keywords Everywhere (paid), to give you a solid idea of the budget range you’ll need to start a successful campaign.

You’ll want to search for keywords that are highly relevant to your business and your target market. You can start by searching “plumber in [city]” or “emergency plumber near me”.

Utilizing these results, you’ll be able to see the “Top of Page Bid (Low Range)” and “Top of Page Bid (High Range)” of each keyword. This range tells you what advertisers in your area are spending for one single click on their ad (also known as cost-per-click or CPC), on both the low end and high end. To give ourselves the best chances of ranking our ads from the start, we’ll focus on the “Top of Page Bid”.

To set a budget that’ll enable you to come out of the gates as strong as possible, you’ll need to aim for 3-5 clicks per day. Any less than that and Google will really struggle to gather enough data to learn and optimize. When it comes to optimizing your campaign, you will also lack the ability to make data-driven decisions and understand what’s working and what isn’t.

Now time for some simple math!

Calculate your daily budget by simply multiplying the “Top of Page Bid” by 3-5.

To get your weekly budget you just multiply that number by 5 (assuming you’ll run ads 5 days a week).

Multiply that number by 4 (4 weeks in a month on average) to get your monthly budget.

Step 2: Design a landing page that converts

A dedicated landing page designed to convert traffic coming from your ads, is a critical and often overlooked component in most Google Ads strategies.

Unlike a regular website page, which may have multiple distractions like navigation links or extra information, your landing page keeps users focused on taking a specific action—whether that’s calling for service, filling out a form, or booking an appointment.

By doing so, you’re significantly increasing the likelihood of turning clicks into actual leads and booked jobs.

So, how do you craft a high converting landing page?

Just like every other step in this guide, we’re just scratching the surface of what really goes into developing and managing a successful search campaign. But on a fundamental level, here are the necessary building blocks for a high converting landing page:

Gain a solid understanding of your target audience and their pain points, desires, problems, and successes. Understand how to make them feel heard!
Craft an irresistible offer that you can present to make a potential customer’s decision that much easier for them.
Include your primary calls to action (form and button to call your business)
Include social proof in the form of testimonials, online reviews, awards, etc. to boost your brand credibility and increase trust.
Understand what makes your service and business unique. How are you different from your competition? What are your unique selling points?
Identify the core benefits of your service and format your solutions as pain relievers. Explain not the “what you provide” but the “how will this help you”.
Avoid fluffy, vague, corporate language (first class, world-class, revolutionary, etc)
Ensure only 3 primary actions can be taken on your landing page; a visitor can call your business, fill out a form, or leave the page.

Your landing landing pages structure should look something like this:

Unfortunately, your landing page is not a set and forget task. As part of the ongoing management and optimization of your campaign, you should always be A/B testing different components of your landing page. This includes changing colors, copy, images, etc.

As we stated, there’s a lot more that goes into building a successful landing page, but following the information above should at least give you a major upper hand compared to your competitors simply directing traffic to their website home page!

Step 3: Configure conversion tracking

Setting up conversion tracking on your ads and landing page is essential for measuring the success of your campaign. To do this, you’ll need to first identify the primary goals of your campaign. As a plumber, this will most likely be phone calls and/or lead form submissions.

Without conversion tracking, you won’t know which ads, ad assets, and landing page components are driving the best results, making it difficult to optimize your campaign based on performance data.

To set it up, you can use Google Ads’ built-in Conversion Tracking and Google Tag Manager which are both free to use. However, we’d highly recommend going for a more advanced conversion tracking setup which is more accurate and can provide MUCH more data.

WhatConverts is a fantastic all-in-one tracking and reporting software that can be used to provide a complete view of where your leads are coming from, record call transcriptions, and tell you which keywords led to a conversion, among many other things!

Once tracking is in place, you can use this data for data-driven optimization, helping you refine your ads, keywords, and budget to focus on what’s driving the most conversions, ensuring maximum return on investment.

Step 4: Build the campaign

Campaign Setup

The first step in building your Google Search Ads campaign is setting up the campaign itself. Here’s a quick rundown of how you can do just that:

Choose your objective – We are going to be choosing “Leads” as the campaign objective, as gathering new leads is the primary goal of our campaign.
Select a campaign type – Being that this is a guide for running search ads, choose Search!
Choose your leads conversion goals – Since we plan on adding a phone number to our landing page and ads, choose “Phone calls from your ads”.
Define target location – You’ll want to narrow down your location as much as possible unless you have a larger budget. We’d recommend targeting the areas you service most.
Set your budget – We’ve already covered this above! You can simply input the daily budget you’ve calculated.
Choose a bidding strategy – For brand new campaigns, we’d recommend setting your bidding strategy to “Maximize Clicks”. This will allow you to gain as much data as possible from the get go, allowing both yourself and Google to optimize based the campaign. Once you start to see a consistent flow of conversion, we’ll be able to switch this bidding strategy to something like “Maximize Conversions”. Pro Tip: DO NOT forget to set a maximum CPC limit (set to no more than a third of your daily spend)! This will ensure you don’t accidentally spend your whole daily budget on one expensive click.
Ad network selection – Make sure the Google Search Network is selected and the Google Display network is NOT selected
Ad scheduling – For smaller budgets, we’d recommend scheduling your ads to run Mon-Fri during your business hours when someone will be available to answer the phone.

Structuring Your Account

Proper account structure helps keep things organized, improves ad relevance, and ensures better performance. The ideal structure involves organizing your campaigns and ad groups in a way that aligns with your services and target audience. Typically, it’s a good idea to align this structure with the structure of your website (assuming your website architecture is organized).

Here’s a simple look at a proper Google Ads account structure:

Source

While this is definitely not the ONLY way to organize your campaigns, we’ll show a simplified example of using your primary services as a way to structure your campaigns:

Campaign 1: Pipes
1. Ad Group 1: Pipe Repair
  1. Keywords: pipe repair near me, pipe repair, emergency pipe repair, pipe repair services
2. Ad Group 2: Pipe Replacement
  1. Keywords: pipe replacement near me, pipe replacement, emergency pipe replacement, pipe replacement services
3. Ad Group 3: Pipe Cleaning
  1. Keywords: pipe cleaning near me, pipe cleaning, emergency pipe cleaning, pipe cleaning services
Campaign 2: Drain Cleaning
1. Ad Group 1: Drain Cleaning
  1. Keywords: drain cleaning near me, drain cleaning, clogged drain cleaning, drain cleaning services
2. Ad Group 2: Unclog Sewer
  1. Keywords: unclog main sewer, unclog sewer, emergency sewer cleaning, sewer cleaning services
3. Ad Group 3: Drain Replacement
  1. Keywords: drain replacement near me, drain replacement, emergency drain replacement, drain replacement services

You might also have a general campaign, which targets keywords such as “plumber near me” or “emergency plumber in [your city]”.

The number of campaigns you have depends entirely on your budget and business goals. The number of ad groups you have depends on the keywords you’re looking to target. For the best results, you’ll need to separate keywords which are highly relevant to one another into their own ad groups. This allows you to create consistent messaging and highly tailored ad copy.

So, when a potential customer searches “pipe repair near me”, they see an ad that’s completely tailored to pipe repairs, not pipe cleanings or pipe replacements. This will admittedly take some time but is completely worth it in the end!

Choosing High Intent Keywords

As we stated earlier, bidding on high-intent keywords will allow you to place your business in front of people who are most likely to convert to customers.

So what is a high-intent keyword? It’s any keyword that indicates a strong desire to take the action you want them to take. So if your goal is to book more customers looking for leaky sink repairs, “how to fix leaky sink by yourself” or “why do sinks leak” are both great examples of low-intent keywords. They are definitely NOT what you’d want your ad to show up for.

Here are some examples of keywords that represent high-intent:

Plumber near me
Best plumber in new milford ct
Emergency toilet leak repair
Clogged drain cleaning
Garbage disposal repair

Google Keyword Planner is a fantastic free tool within the Google Ads platform that will help you to identify high-intent keyword ideas!

Developing Highly Engaging Ad Copy

Your main goal with your ad copy is to get potential customers to click!

Start by pinning high-intent keywords from your ad group to the first position of your ads to ensure relevance and increase your ads quality score. We typically pin no more than 8 keywords to position 1.

Use psychological triggers like scarcity, urgency, guarantees, and bonuses (e.g., “Same-Day Service – Call Now!”). This will help to create a more attractive person!

Align your ad copy with your landing page, incorporating your unique selling points, customer pains, social proof, and key product/service benefits. By aligning your ad to your landing page, you’ll create a seamless experience for your prospect.

Ask direct questions that immediately engage potential customers by addressing their needs. For example, “Need an Emergency Plumber Now?” or “Dealing with a Clogged Drain?” helps confirm to the reader that they’re in the right place.

Include your brand name in the headline or description to build trust and recognition, especially for returning customers or those comparing multiple options. A phrase like “Smith Plumbing – Trusted Since 1998” reinforces credibility.

Finally, use a strong call to action (CTA) to help drive immediate response. Phrases like “Get a Free Estimate,” “Schedule Your Service Now,” or “Call for 24/7 Emergency Repairs” remove hesitation and tell the customer exactly what to do next.

Step 5: Perform ongoing optimization

One of the biggest mistakes plumbing businesses make with Google Ads is treating them like a “set it and forget it” system. In reality, your campaign needs time to grow—collecting valuable data and learning from it.

The more data you gather, the more informed your optimizations can be, leading to stronger results and a more efficient ad spend. The key is knowing what to adjust and how often.

Sample Optimization Checklist

✅ Every 2–3 Days

Review your Search Terms Report and add negative keywords to block irrelevant clicks
Review your Search Terms Report and identify new high-performing long-tail keywords to include in your ad groups

✅ Weekly

Analyze underperforming keywords and ads
Review Google’s Recommendations tab—decide what to implement or reject
Pause ads or keywords that are draining budget without results

✅ Monthly

Check Auction Insights to monitor competitor activity
A/B test new ad copy
Test functionality of landing pages

✅ Quarterly

Adjust bidding strategies based on time of day, device, and audience behavior
Reevaluate your campaign goals and consider updates to smart bidding strategies
Fine-tune location targeting

Pro Tip: Don’t over-optimize your campaigns. Making too many changes in a short window—especially in the first few weeks—can hurt more than help. We recommend only adding negative keywords in the early stage while letting the campaign collect enough data to make informed adjustments.

Step 6: Measure results and identify opportunities for growth

Once your campaign is up and running, the last crucial step of the process begins: measuring performance and uncovering new ways to improve. This step is essential to maximizing the return on your ad spend and scaling your lead generation efforts over time.

Start by consistently analyzing your conversion data — both lead form submissions and phone calls. We recommend taking a deep dive into the data every 3-6 months and more frequent checkups biweekly or monthly to spot trends early and make timely adjustments.

Keep a close eye on your core KPIs:

Conversion Rate – Are visitors taking the action you want?
Cost per Conversion – How much are you paying for each lead?
Average CPC – Are your clicks staying cost-effective?
Total Ad Spend – Is your budget being used efficiently?
ROAS (Return on Ad Spend) – Most importantly, is your investment turning into real business?

Thanks to the accurate conversion tracking you set up earlier in this guide, you’ve laid the groundwork for meaningful, data-driven decisions.

In addition to the reports your tracking tools provide, you can also build custom reports directly in Google Ads using the Report Editor. This lets you slice and dice your data to better understand what’s working — and more importantly, where the next big opportunity lies.

Final Thoughts

Search Ads can be one of the most powerful tools in your plumbing business’s marketing toolbox — when done right. With the right strategy they can become a reliable, cost-effective source of high-quality leads.

We hope this guide has helped you to better understand the world of PPC advertising! If you’re ready to grow your plumbing business with Google Ads but aren’t sure where to start, we’d be happy to help. Whether you need a quick audit or full campaign management, reach out today and let’s talk about how to turn your ads into booked appointments.