Plumber Brisbane: cost per lead down 29.6% to $57.21

A set radius, and a phone that has to ring right

Alliance Plumbing is a licensed Brisbane plumbing company working a defined radius around Coorparoo — blocked drains, hot water, gas fitting, burst pipes, the everyday emergencies.

Plumbing is one of the easiest categories in Australia to buy enquiries in, and one of the easiest to buy the wrong ones in. A call from the wrong side of the river, a tenant who cannot authorise the work, somebody after free advice: all three look identical in a report until a person in the office picks up the phone and finds out.

Where it started

Brisbane plumbing clicks are not cheap, and the account opened at a price that reflected it. In the earlier of the two periods below, the business was paying $81.26 for every enquiry. That is survivable when nearly all of them are real jobs inside the service radius. It is punishing when they are not.

So the brief had less to do with scale than with making sure the money was buying calls a plumber would actually want to take.

Why a service radius changes the maths

Brisbane is a city of bridges and river bends, and a suburb that looks close on a map can be half an hour of traffic away. For a company working a defined radius, every job outside it costs twice: the drive out, and the call from a regular customer that came in while the van was on the wrong side of town.

That is why a lead from three suburbs over is not a smaller version of a good lead. It is a different thing entirely, and an account that cannot tell them apart will happily buy both at the same price.

What we took on

A single search campaign, with only some of the months that carried spend running long enough to judge — those are the periods reported here, and we have left the dates off them deliberately. Taken over the whole account rather than one window, it served 22,011 impressions, took 1,578 clicks and produced 363 tracked enquiries, 54 of which were phone calls.

Those traffic numbers are deliberately small. The job was to narrow the funnel rather than widen it — rebuilding the account around enquiries that end with a van being dispatched, and writing the ads to the job in front of the customer, because a burst pipe at 6am and a planned hot water replacement are not the same conversation.

Plenty of accounts would have been reported as improving simply by buying more clicks. This one was pointed the other way, which takes a little nerve early on, because the traffic charts get smaller before anything good shows up in the enquiry column.

One period to the next — cost per lead down 29.6%

The earlier period sat at $81.26 per enquiry. The next, across 21 days, came back to $57.21 — a fall of 29.6% — and produced 87 enquiries while it did it.

The quality of the traffic moved at the same time. In the earlier one, 20.08% of clicks became an enquiry. In the next, 27.71% did, an improvement of 37.98%. Cheaper and better together is the signature of something being changed rather than something being throttled.

The busiest month came later

Efficiency then held while volume grew. The account's strongest month for enquiries ran 23 days: 106.96 tracked enquiries at $68.50 each, including 20 phone calls, from 478 clicks at a 22.38% conversion rate.

Taken over the whole account rather than one period, 23% of everyone who clicked went on to enquire.

• $81.26 to $57.21 cost per lead, a 29.6% drop — one measured period to the next in 2026
• 87 enquiries — a 21-day period in 2026
• 20.08% to 27.71% conversion rate, up 37.98% — over those same two periods
• 106.96 enquiries at $68.50 each, including 20 phone calls — a 23-day period in 2026
• 478 clicks at a 22.38% conversion rate — that same period
• 363 enquiries and 54 phone calls from 1,578 clicks — across the account's wider run
• 23% conversion rate and a 7.17% click-through rate — same basis

Each figure sits with the period it came from. Nothing here is averaged across the account or offered as a forecast.

What it meant for the business

Nearly a quarter of everyone who clicked going on to enquire only happens when the traffic arriving is the traffic the business wanted. The 7.17% click-through rate on the same basis says the same thing from the other end: the right people were recognising the ad as relevant to them and the wrong ones were scrolling past it.

In practical terms, the fall from $81.26 to $57.21 from one period to the next changes what a business can say yes to. A plumbing company measures a lead against the average job value, and when the lead costs less, smaller jobs become worth attending. Small jobs are also how a plumber becomes the one a household rings the next time something bigger fails.

The 54 phone calls matter for a related reason. Somebody who wants a plumber today is a very different prospect from a form filled in on a Sunday night. And the busiest period settled the question that mattered most to a business with a fixed service radius: a tighter account did not turn out to be a smaller one.

It is worth pausing on how few clicks are behind all of this. 1,578 across the whole account is not a lot of traffic by any measure, and an agency chasing a dashboard would be embarrassed by it. Those 1,578 clicks produced 363 enquiries, which is the only comparison that pays anybody's wages.

The month-to-month picture backs it up. The 21-day period was the cheapest at $57.21, the 23-day one was the busiest at 106.96 enquiries, and neither came at the other's expense. Cost held its ground while output grew, which is the pattern you want and the rarest one to find in a plumbing account.

If your phone is ringing but the jobs are wrong

Most plumbing businesses we speak to do not have a lead volume problem. They have a lead quality problem that looks like a volume problem — plenty of enquiries, not enough of them worth driving to. If that sounds like your account, ask SoudCoh for a look at it. We will tell you what your enquiries are really costing and which ones were never going to turn into work.