Complete Flow Plumbing · Plumbing and drainage · Wollongong, Illawarra and Shoalhaven, NSW
Complete Flow Plumbing: 5.3× Google Ads return in the first fortnight
Complete Flow Plumbing won jobs worth 5.3 times its Google Ads spend in the first 14 days of ads. Searches naming a local town brought in 52% of won revenue over the first three weeks, and weekends, two days in seven, brought in 48%. Almost all of the won work started with a phone call.
Services
Google Ads management · Enquiry tracking and won-job reporting · Website design and landing pages
Each figure names the window it covers. Use the info button on a tile to see how it was measured.
Headline result
5.3×
Return on ad spend: won job value against Google Ads spend
First 14 days of Google Ads
How it was measured
Value of jobs the client marked as won, from enquiries traced to Google Ads, divided by Google Ads spend over the same days. Rounded down. The 14 days start on the first day the ads spent money.
5.8×
Return on ad spend as the account kept running
First 20 days of Google Ads
How it was measured
Value of jobs the client marked as won, from enquiries traced to Google Ads, divided by Google Ads spend over the same days. Rounded down. Complete days only. Some enquiries from these days were still open, so the figure may rise.
52%
Share of won revenue from searches naming a local town
First three weeks of ads
How it was measured
Won job value from searches that named a local town, as a share of all won job value from Google Ads enquiries over the same days. One won job with no recorded search was left out of the town group, so this is conservative.
2.2×
More won work per ad dollar from weekend enquiries than from weekday ones
First three weeks of ads
How it was measured
Won value from Saturday and Sunday enquiries divided by Saturday and Sunday ad spend, compared with the same for weekdays (Sydney time). Rounded down.
23%
Google Ads enquiries that became won jobs
First three weeks of ads
How it was measured
Won jobs divided by all enquiries traced to Google Ads (calls and forms, test entries removed) over the same days.
69%
Won jobs confirmed within 24 hours of the first enquiry
First three weeks of ads
How it was measured
Time between the enquiry arriving and the client marking the job as won in its job records.
How we measured +
Won job means a job Complete Flow Plumbing marked as won in its own job records, valued at the agreed job price; no payment amounts are recorded, so the figures use agreed prices rather than cash collected. Return on ad spend is won job value from enquiries traced to Google Ads, divided by Google Ads spend over the same days, rounded down; it is a revenue return before materials, labour and fees, not profit. Every window is counted from the first day the ads spent money: the first 14 days, the first 20 complete days, and the first three weeks (21 days, the last of them still in progress when the figures were taken). Enquiries are tracked calls and web forms, with test entries removed. Search themes use the search the customer typed where it was recorded and the ad's matched search phrase otherwise; region is the town named in the search, not the customer's address. Job types come from the notes of tracked calls. The shares rest on a small number of jobs from a new account, so they will move as more weeks come in.
In one minute
The 60-second version
Complete Flow Plumbing, from the brief to the result in 5 short slides.
01 The business
A Wollongong plumber covering the Illawarra and Shoalhaven
Complete Flow Plumbing handles hot water, blocked drains, leaks, burst pipes and 24/7 call-outs, from the Sutherland Shire down to the Shoalhaven, with a written fixed quote before work starts.
02 The problem
A new Google Ads account that had to pay its way early
The Google Ads account was new. It had to bring in won work in the first weeks, and every result had to trace back to a real job with an agreed price.
03 What we built
Ads by town and by service, landing on matching pages
One campaign targets searches naming the towns the business covers; others target jobs such as hot water, blocked drains and leaks. Ads land on the matching town or service page, and calls are traced to won jobs.
04 What happened
Positive from the first fortnight
Won jobs came to 5.3 times ad spend in the first 14 days, counted from the first day of spend, and 5.8 times over the first 20 days. 98% of won revenue started with a phone call.
5.3×return on ad spend, first 14 days of Google Ads
05 What we learned
Town names and weekends did the heavy lifting
Searches naming a local town brought in 52% of won revenue. Weekends, two days in seven, brought in 48% and returned 2.2 times as much won work per ad dollar as weekdays.
52%of won revenue from searches naming a local town
01 / 05
Insights
What the data showed
What Complete Flow Plumbing’s own records showed once the work was live. Open a card for the full finding and how it was measured.
Local01
52%
Searches naming a local town brought in more than half of all won revenue.
Searches naming a local town52%
Everything else48%
52% of won revenue came from searches that named a local town. Those searches came through the town campaign, which answers each one with an ad and a page for that town. In this account, a town name in the search was a better sign of a won job than the name of a service.
How it was measured. Won job value from searches that named a local town, as a share of all won job value from Google Ads enquiries, first three weeks of ads. The search the customer typed was used where recorded, otherwise the ad's matched search phrase. One won job with no recorded search was left out of the town group, so this is conservative.
Search02
3.6×
Town-named searches returned 3.6 times as much won work per ad dollar as service searches.
Searches naming a service1×
Searches naming a local town3.6×
Each ad dollar spent on searches naming a town brought back 3.6 times as much won work as a dollar spent on searches naming a specific job, such as hot water or blocked drains. The jobs were close in size: the average job from a service search was only 1.1 times the average from a town search.
How it was measured. Ad spend was grouped by the theme of each targeted search phrase, and won value by the theme of the search behind each enquiry. Town-named return divided by service-named return, first three weeks of ads, conservative version, rounded down.
Local03
43%
Searches naming Shoalhaven towns brought in 43% of won revenue for a Wollongong-based plumber.
Searches naming Shoalhaven towns43%
Everything else57%
Complete Flow is based in Wollongong, yet searches naming Shoalhaven towns produced 43% of won revenue in the first three weeks. The ads aimed at those towns returned more than 17 times their cost in won work. That rests on a small number of jobs, but it makes the drive south worth planning for as its own market.
How it was measured. Won jobs whose search named a town were grouped by the region of that town, not the customer's address. Share of all won value, first three weeks of ads. The return compares won value from Shoalhaven-town searches with spend on ads aimed at searches naming a Shoalhaven town.
Timing04
48%
Weekends, two days in seven, produced 48% of won revenue.
Weekend share of the week29%
Weekend share of won revenue48%
Saturday and Sunday enquiries produced 48% of won revenue and returned 2.2 times as much won work per ad dollar as weekday enquiries. It rests on a small number of jobs, but for a plumber who answers the phone at the weekend, weekend ads are worth keeping on rather than trimming.
How it was measured. Won value from enquiries made on Saturday or Sunday (Sydney time) as a share of all won value, first three weeks of ads. The weekend share of the week is two days in seven. The 2.2 times compares won value per ad dollar on weekends with weekdays, rounded down.
Calls05
98%
98% of won revenue started with a phone call rather than a web form.
Phone calls98%
Web forms2%
Almost all won work began with a tracked call from the ads, and about one in three tracked calls from the ads became a won job. Many plumbing problems can't wait, which is why the call button sits near the top of the town and service pages.
How it was measured. Won job value from enquiries that arrived as tracked phone calls, as a share of all won job value, first three weeks of ads. The call rate is won jobs from tracked ad calls divided by all tracked ad calls over the same days.
Website development · Complete Flow Plumbing
We built their website, too.
Explore the website we designed for Complete Flow Plumbing: the pages, the mobile experience and the path to an enquiry.
Explore Complete Flow Plumbing’s website, from the first impression to the details.
Use the left and right arrow keys to browse screenshots. Home goes to the first screenshot and End goes to the last.
Home page: the call button and a written fixed-quote form sit above the fold.
01 / 02 · Home page: the call button and a written fixed-quote form sit above the fold.
The case study
The project, connected.
The brief, the work and what it delivered.
The starting point
Complete Flow Plumbing
Complete Flow Plumbing is a Wollongong plumbing business covering the Illawarra, the Shoalhaven and the Sutherland Shire, with 24/7 call-outs for hot water, blocked drains, leaks and burst pipes.
Plumbing and drainage · Wollongong, Illawarra and Shoalhaven, NSW
SoudCoh services
Google Ads management
Enquiry tracking and won-job reporting
Website design and landing pages
What we put in place
The campaign work
A Google Ads campaign built around the towns the business covers, with ads sending people to the matching town page.
Service campaigns covering hot water, blocked drains, leaks and other common plumbing jobs, sending people to the matching service page.
Tracked calls and forms traced from the ad to the job, with won jobs recorded at the agreed price in the client's job records.
A review of won job value by search theme, the town named in the search and the day of the week.
What the project delivered
The outcome
Won jobs worth 5.3 times Google Ads spend in the first 14 days of ads, with searches naming a local town bringing in 52% of won revenue over the first three weeks.
Complete Flow Plumbing won jobs worth 5.3 times its Google Ads spend in the first 14 days of ads. The account was positive from the first fortnight, and the enquiries were high intent: almost all of the won work came by phone, and more than half of it from searches that named a local town.
The business
Complete Flow Plumbing is a plumbing business based in Wollongong. Its team covers the Illawarra, the Shoalhaven towns further down the South Coast and the Sutherland Shire, with 24/7 call-outs for hot water, blocked drains, leaks and burst pipes. Customers get a written fixed quote before any work starts.
Over the first three weeks of ads, blocked drains and sewer backups made up about a third of won revenue. The rest split fairly evenly between hot water repairs and replacements, leak finding and burst pipes, and toilet and shower replacements.
What we set out to do
The Google Ads account was new, with no history to lean on. It had to bring in won work from the first weeks, and every result had to trace back to a real job with an agreed price, rather than to a click or a form fill. We also wanted to learn early which towns, which kinds of search and which days of the week produced the work, so the budget could follow the jobs.
What we built
The account is built around two ideas. One campaign targets searches that name the towns the business covers, so someone searching for a plumber in a named town sees an ad for that town and lands on that town's page. The service campaigns target specific jobs, such as hot water, blocked drains and leaks, and send people to the matching service page.
Each town has its own page, so a search that names the town lands on a page written for it.
Every call and form from the ads is traced to the ad that produced it and, where it was recorded, the search phrase behind it. Calls arrive on tracked numbers. When the client marks a job as won in its own job records, the agreed job price is recorded against the enquiry, so the return on ad spend is built from real won jobs. Test entries are removed before anything is counted.
In the first 14 days, counted from the first day the ads spent money, won jobs came to 5.3 times Google Ads spend. Over the first 20 days the figure was 5.8 times, with some enquiries still open. Across the first three weeks, almost one in four Google Ads enquiries became a won job.
The phone did the closing. 98% of won revenue started with a call rather than a web form, and about one in three phone enquiries from the ads became a won job. The work was settled quickly too: 69% of won jobs were confirmed within 24 hours of the first enquiry, and the typical job was won in under a day.
What the numbers taught us
Town names beat service names
52% of won revenue came from searches that named a local town. Those searches returned 3.6 times as much won work per ad dollar as searches naming a specific service, and the jobs were close in size: the average job from a service search was only 1.1 times the average from a town search.
Customers also tended not to search for the job they ended up booking. Going by the call notes, about 7 in 10 dollars of won revenue came from people whose search did not name the job they booked: either a plain search for a plumber in a named town, or a search about a different problem. That is a judgement made from call notes, so treat it as a rough guide. A town page that covers every common job serves that customer well.
The Shoalhaven pulled its weight
For a Wollongong-based plumber, 43% of won revenue came from searches naming Shoalhaven towns, and the ads aimed at those towns returned more than 17 times their cost in won work. Region here means the town named in the search, not the customer's address. The Shoalhaven figures rest on a small number of jobs, but they make the drive south worth planning for as its own market.
Weekends paid best
Saturdays and Sundays, two days in seven, produced 48% of won revenue. Weekend enquiries returned 2.2 times as much won work per ad dollar as weekday enquiries. For a business that answers the phone at the weekend, that budget is worth keeping on.
These are the first three weeks of a new account, and the shares rest on a small set of jobs, so a few larger jobs can move them. The direction is clear enough to act on: keep the town campaign well funded, keep weekends covered and keep answering the phone fast.
How we measured it
Return on ad spend is the value of jobs the client marked as won, from enquiries traced to Google Ads, divided by Google Ads spend over the same days, rounded down. Won value is the agreed job price recorded in the client's job records. It is a revenue return before materials, labour and fees, so it should not be read as profit. Each window is counted from the first day the ads spent money.
The definitions behind the campaign results, from enquiries and conversion rates to advertising spend.
Conversion
An action recorded under the account’s conversion setup, such as a tracked call, form submission, booking or purchase. Platform call/form enquiries are described separately in the study; repeat calls can be separate events, so enquiries are not necessarily unique people.
Cost per job · cost per lead
Advertising spend divided by the relevant recorded enquiry or job count. The study identifies the denominator. Enquiry cost is considered alongside lead quality and job value.
Conversion rate
The share of people who clicked the ad and then did the thing. A high click count with a low conversion rate usually means the ad and the page are promising different things.
Ad spend
Money spent on the advertising platform. The enquiry costs and revenue-to-ad-spend figures here exclude agency fees and the cost of delivering the client’s service.
The measurement window
The period covered by the result, with spend and outcomes drawn from the same reporting window.
A starting point
Starting values appear beside the resulting figure when the account history is available.
Qualified lead
An enquiry that matched the service and the service area, so it was worth someone picking up the phone for. Where a study says qualified, somebody checked.
An anonymised client
A project published without the client’s name. The page identifies its sector and explains the scope of the work.
Put your own numbers to work: work out the ROAS your margin needs, with your own click price and close rate. It takes about a minute and asks for nothing.
— 06 · The rules behind it
How we run accounts
The two numbers behind this result.
Every account we run follows the same written rules, published on the SoudCoh Compound page. This result rests on two of them: deciding what counts as a real enquiry, and starting each account with what the others learned.
We agree which calls, forms, bookings or sales count as a result, and a real test enquiry goes through every tracking path before the campaign goes live.
The number it moves: Waste blocked before the first click
Every change on an account like this one is written to that client's change history, and what it teaches, never the client's numbers, goes into the next account's starting point.
Start with your goals and current setup. We review the opportunity, agree the work and plan the next stage with you.
The call
Thirty to forty-five minutes, free
What you sell, who buys it, and what one customer is worth to you. No deck. You leave with a real number for your situation rather than a range.
Week 0
The audit
We open your account — or your competitors' ground, if you do not have one yet — and write down every leak we can find. That list is yours whether or not you work with us.
Week 1
The build
Everything the account needs before it can spend a dollar: what it will bid on, what it must never pay for, the ad copy, the assets, the landing pages and the tracking. It waits in our approval queue, and a real test enquiry goes through every tracking path before anything is live.
Day one
You press go
Campaigns are created paused, every time, so you can read the whole build first. You activate when you are ready, not when we are.
Days 1–14
The clean
The busiest fortnight your account will ever have. Search terms read daily, waste negated, early winners promoted, ad copy iterated against what is actually being served.
From there
Rhythm
Weekly optimisation, reporting on a fixed cadence whether the news is good or bad, and a proper conversation each quarter about where the next block of budget should go.
Before you ask us anything
Here is what everybody asks first.
FAQ
The questions this raises.
How the results were measured and how the approach could apply to plumbing businesses.
How was the 5.3× return for Complete Flow Plumbing worked out?
We took the value of every job Complete Flow Plumbing marked as won from an enquiry traced to Google Ads in the first 14 days of ads, and divided it by Google Ads spend over the same 14 days. Won value is the agreed job price recorded in the client's job records. The result is rounded down.
Why do the 14 days start on the first day of ad spend?
Because that is the honest starting point. A new account spends little in its first days while it ramps up, and counting from day one means the figure is not flattered by picking a later start date. The 20-day and three-week figures follow the same rule.
Is a 5.3× return the same as profit?
No. It compares the agreed value of won jobs with what was spent on Google Ads. It leaves out materials, labour and management fees, and it uses agreed job prices rather than cash collected, so it is a revenue return.
What counts as a search naming a local town?
A search that named a town or suburb the business covers, usually alongside plumbing or a specific job. We used the search the customer typed where it was recorded, otherwise the ad's matched search phrase. One won job with no recorded search was left out of the town group, so the 52% is conservative. Region comes from the town named in the search, not the customer's address.
What do the results in this Complete Flow Plumbing case study measure?
Campaign results describe the enquiries or job outcomes reported for the client. Each figure identifies what it measures.
Which records support these results?
Result basis: First 14 days of Google Ads. The labels distinguish advertising conversions, call/form enquiries and won-job revenue. Enquiry events can include repeat calls; booked jobs are reported separately.
Would this work for plumbing businesses like mine?
We assess your service area, competition, margins and customer value, then build a plan around the opportunities in your business. The first call establishes the priorities, budget and tracking for that work.
Why does this study show a result but not a starting point?
Where a comparable earlier result is available, the study shows both values. New accounts report their launch result, with the tracking basis explained alongside it.
— 09 · Read next
More work for plumbing businesses.
Explore the campaigns, websites and customer journeys we have built for more businesses in this industry.
pages in one plumbing website: services, suburbs, specials and booking
Live sitemap count
We built Complete Flow Plumbing a 325-page website: 28 service pages, 288 suburb pages from the Sutherland Shire to the Shoalhaven, and fixed-scope prices.
Complete Flow Plumbing is a licensed, locally owned plumbing business covering the Sutherland Shire, Wollongong, Shellharbour, Kiama and the Shoalhaven, with no call-out fee and a written price before work starts.
Delivered: 325 pages: 28 service pages and 288 suburb pages, plus Specials, Book Online, About, Contact and FAQ pages. A Plumbing Services menu that sorts 22 services into five groups, most-requested jobs first.
Outcome: Every service and every suburb the business covers has its own page, and the Google Ads that launched with the site returned 5.3 times ad spend in won jobs in the first 14 days.
pages in one plumbing landing site: services, jobs, regions and suburbs
Live sitemap count
We built the 526-page site that Plumbwell Plumbing's Google Ads send people to: 19 services, 76 job pages, 12 regions and 410 suburb pages.
Plumbwell Plumbing is a Marrickville-based plumbing business working across the Inner West and greater Sydney, with no call-out fee and the price in writing before work starts.
Delivered: 526 pages: 19 service pages, 76 job pages, 12 region pages and 410 suburb pages. A Services menu that opens each service into its job pages.
Outcome: The service ad groups and the suburb campaign each have pages to send people to, with the call button and the callback form in the same place on every one.
1/4 · A home page that leads with the price promise
Website development
Newcastle Plumbing
PlumbingWebsite design
Newcastle and the Hunter, NSW
449
pages in one plumbing website: services, suburbs, regions and guides
Live sitemap count
We built Newcastle Plumbing a 449-page website for the Hunter: 92 service pages, 280 suburb pages on real maps, 50 guides and online booking.
Newcastle Plumbing is a local plumbing business with its own licensed plumbers, covering Newcastle, Lake Macquarie, Maitland, Port Stephens, the Hunter Valley and the northern Central Coast.
Delivered: 92 service pages in five groups, each with a step-by-step job story. 280 suburb pages with boundary maps, in six regions.
Outcome: Whatever the plumbing problem and wherever the home in the Hunter, there is a page that explains it and a clear way to call or book.
