Sydney plumbing: 84 enquiries in a 23-day period

Sydney has no shortage of plumbing searches, and that is the trap

Sydney produces more plumbing searches in a week than most Australian cities manage in a month. The abundance is exactly what makes it dangerous. Spending a lot of money here is easy; working out which part of it did anything is hard. The auction is deep, two identically worded searches can carry completely different intent, and the businesses already bidding have been at it for years.

That last point is the one new advertisers underestimate. An established Sydney plumbing account is not only competing on budget, it is competing with memory — a record of which searches produced booked jobs and which produced tyre-kickers, accumulated over tens of thousands of clicks. A new account has none of that. It walks into the same auction with the same money and worse information, and for a while it pays for the privilege of learning.

Worth doing anyway, because of what sits underneath. Sydney plumbing work is emergency work as often as not: hot water systems that die overnight, blocked sewers, a leak quietly wrecking something expensive by the hour. Those jobs are worth enough that a plumber can afford to pay properly for the enquiry, and the customer is in no mood to compare.

The enquiries themselves show it. Of the 87 this account has recorded, 61 came in as phone leads and 26 as submitted forms. Sixty-five of the 87 came from a mobile phone.

Nobody fills in a contact form while water is coming through the ceiling.

What 1UP Plumbing asked for

1UP Plumbing was starting from a standing position in that market. The requirement was blunt — real enquiries, at a number the business could live with, arriving quickly enough that the account did not spend three months paying tuition fees to Google.

It ran in 2026 through a single campaign, and what follows is one measured period lifted out of it, reported without dates on purpose. Taken over the whole account rather than that one period, it has served 17,208 impressions, drawn 714 clicks at a 4.15% click-through rate, and recorded 87 enquiries at a blended $148.09 each. Account-wide, 12.18% of clicks became an enquiry.

Deliberately, this was one campaign rather than a sprawl. Spreading a new account thin is the fastest way to learn nothing: the data comes back in pieces too small to trust, and you end up making confident decisions off six clicks. Everything went into a tightly held, problem-led approach, with ads written to the specific job the customer is trying to get done.

The honest shape of it is a short ramp, then one full month, then a thin tail. The opening stretch produced 2 enquiries from 19 clicks, which is a ramp rather than a result, and the tail was far too short to read at all. Everything meaningful in this account happened in that one full month, and that month is what we will hold it to.

The first full month: 84 enquiries in 23 days

• 84 enquiries in the measured period — from 639 clicks and 15,493 impressions across 23 days
• $140.84 per enquiry in that period, against a blended $148.09 across the account's wider run
• 13.15% of clicks became enquiries in that period, against 12.18% on the account's broader average
• 4.12% click-through rate in the period — 639 clicks against 15,493 impressions
• 59 of the 84 enquiries in the period arrived as phone leads; 25 came through as submitted forms
• 64 of the 84 came from a mobile phone, 15 from desktop and 5 from a tablet

Eighty-four enquiries in a month, from an account that was still new to the auction, is the figure to hold onto. The cost per enquiry is honest rather than spectacular. $140.84 is what urgent plumbing work costs in Sydney when you are new and have not yet built the performance history that lets an established account bid with confidence.

Read the blend the right way round

Most accounts get dearer as they scale. This one did the opposite, and the arithmetic is sitting in plain sight: the account-wide figure of $148.09 sits above the period's $140.84, not below it, because the thin ramp-up days either side dragged the average upward.

Put another way, the expensive part of this account was the beginning, not the busy month. It got cheaper as it got bigger, which is the reverse of what usually happens when a new advertiser turns the volume up.

The device split deserves a sentence as well. Sixty-four of the period's 84 enquiries came from mobile phones, off 485 mobile clicks. Desktop contributed 15 enquiries from 127 clicks, tablets another 5 from 27. This is a trade where the customer is standing in front of the problem when they search, and the numbers say so plainly.

One caution, stated plainly: this is not a long history. A single strong month establishes that the demand exists and can be bought at a workable price. It does not establish a trend, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

What it changed for the business

Eighty-four enquiries is a month of work in the diary. For a plumbing business that previously had no paid channel producing anything, going from nothing to a steady weekly flow of people asking for a plumber changes what can be planned at all. Hiring stops being a bet on next month's phone. Van scheduling can be built a week out instead of a day out. Quotes can be held at a proper price, because something else is booked behind them.

The phone-heavy split matters here as much as the count. Fifty-nine of the period's enquiries came in as calls — roughly two and a half every working day, most from people who will ring the next plumber rather than wait for a callback. Advertising can put those calls on the phone. Whether they turn into jobs is decided in the first fifteen seconds by whoever answers, which is a staffing decision rather than a marketing one, and far better known before the calls start than after.

There is also a real number to make decisions with now. Once you know an enquiry cost $140.84 in a period like this one, and you know what share of enquiries you book, you can decide how many you want to buy and what you are prepared to pay for the next hundred. Before that, every budget conversation is guesswork dressed up as strategy.

A fast start buys something quieter too. An account that produces 84 enquiries in its first full month has bought more than the enquiries — it has bought enough evidence to make the next decision on. A new advertiser's real enemy is not cost. It is the six months spent flying blind.

Starting from zero?

New accounts are their own discipline. What works for an established advertiser with three years of history behind it will quietly drain a new one, because the established account is making decisions off evidence the new account has not gathered yet. If you are standing up paid search for a plumbing business and would rather not fund that education twice, talk to us before you switch anything on.