The business
Elite Plumbing Group is a Wollongong plumbing business with an established base of builder work. Dylan’s brief was to grow the household side: hot water, leaks, gas heaters, taps, toilets and drains for homeowners across Wollongong and the Illawarra.
Builder work tends to come through relationships. Household work starts with a search, often when something has already gone wrong. It needed its own campaigns, its own pages and its own way of showing which enquiries turned into work.
What we set out to do
The goal was simple to state: bring in household enquiries for the jobs Elite wants, and know which of those enquiries became won work. Clicks and calls on their own do not tell a plumber much. The client’s job records do.
So from the first day of ads, every enquiry needed to carry its source, and every won job needed to be marked against the enquiry it came from, at the agreed job price.
What we built
A Google Ads account organised by service, so a homeowner looking for hot water repairs, leak detection, blocked drains, gas fitting or tap and pipe repairs saw an ad and a page about that job. A campaign for urgent work was added later. Ads ran Monday to Saturday.
The pages the ads sent people to offered two ways in: a tracked phone number and a short quote request form near the top of the page, alongside the main contact form. Calls and forms were both traced to the ad that produced them, and the client marked each job as won or lost in their own job records. That closed the loop from search to won job.
The website behind the campaign is covered in the Elite Plumbing Group website case study.
What happened
Nearly 1 in 3 website quote requests from Google Ads became a won job for Elite Plumbing Group. Across every Google Ads enquiry, calls and forms together, about 1 in 7 became a won job, with more than a third still showing no final outcome in the job records when these figures were taken.
The form and the phone behaved very differently. Website quote requests were only about a third of Google Ads enquiries, but they carried 90% of won job value. Phone calls brought most of the volume and a small share of the value.
Two examples show the pattern. The largest job of the campaign came from a customer who clicked a hot water repair ad on a Saturday and sent a quote request the next day, when no ads were running. The second largest started with a price-check search about replacing a hot water system, sent as a quote request early on a weekday morning.
Searches matched to a named job carry the value. More than 70% of won job value came from searches matched to a named job, such as leak detection, hot water repair or a fireplace install, or to a question about price. On average, those jobs were worth nearly 2× as much as jobs from general plumber searches, such as nearby-plumber or town-named searches.
Hot water is the anchor service. Hot water repairs and replacements brought in about half of won job value, and 3 in 5 hot water enquiries became won work.
Timing matters. Fewer than 1 in 6 of all enquiries arrived on a Saturday or Sunday, yet weekend enquiries produced about 60% of won job value. Enquiries that arrived before 9am were nearly 3× as likely to become a won job as those later in the day.
The number of won jobs is small, so the service and timing figures are a direction rather than a rule. The quote-request result is the most robust of them. For any plumber building household work, the practical lessons hold: give the quote form a prominent place, give named-job searches their own ads and pages, and be ready to reply first thing in the morning and at the weekend.
For a plumbing business with several services or service areas, explore our Google Ads management to plan campaigns around the jobs you want to win.
