Plumbing leads Adelaide: 46 enquiries in a 12-day period

Plumbing does not give you a second chance

Demand in this trade does not build gradually. A drain backs up, a hot water unit dies, a pipe lets go under a slab — and the customer rings whoever looks credible and available right now. Second place gets nothing.

So the advertising either turns up at the exact moment of the problem, or it may as well not be running. There is no middle setting.

The economics follow from that urgency. Nobody collects three quotes when there is water coming through the ceiling, so the click is expensive, because every plumber in the city wants that same moment. The job on the other side of it is substantial though. A hot water replacement, a jetted drain, a leak found under a slab and repaired — none of those are fifty-dollar call-outs, which is what makes an enquiry price in the seventies a completely different proposition here than in a trade with a small average ticket.

The question was never whether these leads are cheap. It is how many of them are real.

Adelaide is a smaller market with the good names already in it

Adelaide is not Sydney and it is not Melbourne. It is a smaller search market, with a large share of established housing stock and a well-known set of local plumbing names already bidding on the same phrases.

A new account does not get to be patient in a market like that. It cannot spend three months learning at the client's expense, because the client can count.

Plumb SA arrived with exactly that constraint. New account, first spend from a standing start in 2026, no back catalogue of performance to lean on and no cushion of historical data. It had to work in weeks.

What we took on

A single campaign covering the full trade: emergency call-outs, blocked drains, hot water, gas, leak detection and burst pipes. Dates are withheld on purpose here, so what follows is a selected period rather than a calendar.

Across the account it served 4,132 impressions and took 324 clicks, an account-wide click-through rate of 7.84%. Both of those numbers are small deliberately. In an emergency trade the value is not in being seen widely, it is in being seen by the person with water on the floor.

Over the same stretch the ads appeared for 17.91% of the searches they were eligible for, holding a top-of-page position 11.61% of the time. Five-sixths of the available auction was never contested, so every figure in the next section came out of a fraction of what Adelaide was searching for.

We will not walk you through how that was done. It is the part clients pay us for, and it is the reason the numbers below arrived as quickly as they did.

46 plumbing enquiries in a 12-day period in 2026

The period we are reporting was the account's strongest on every measure we track, and it managed it in twelve trading days.

• 46 enquiries — across a 12-day period in 2026
• $71.91 per lead — same period
• 16.97% conversion rate from 271 clicks and 3,489 impressions — the same period in 2026
• 6 tracked phone calls on the ads — same period
• 54 conversions at $72.25 per lead — across the account's wider run

Twelve trading days produced 46 enquiries. That is close to four a day, in a trade where a single blocked drain or hot water replacement is a serious ticket.

More to the point, they did not arrive in one lucky burst. 11 of the 12 days in that period in 2026 produced at least one enquiry, and the pattern held either side of it. The strongest single day brought in 11 enquiries from 28 clicks.

Within the selected period the click-through rate ran at 7.77%, against 7.84% on the account's broader average. Showing both is the point. Nothing about the headline result depended on an unusual week of cheap attention, because the account behaved the same way in the days either side of the month boundary.

Half wanted to talk. Half wanted it in writing.

Of the 54 conversions recorded account-wide, 28 came in as a phone call and 26 as a submitted form. For an emergency trade that split is close to ideal.

Half the demand wanted a plumber on the line immediately. The other half was willing to write the problem down, which usually means it can be booked into a route rather than dropped everything for. Device data points the same way: 41 of the 46 enquiries in the selected period in 2026 came from a mobile phone.

The period that followed is on the record too, and it deserves a caveat rather than a headline: 8 enquiries at $74.22 each at a 15.09% conversion rate, across only 2 days. Two days is not a month and we are not going to dress it up as one. It sits here because leaving it out would be the more selective choice.

The account-wide averages — 54 conversions from 324 clicks at a 16.67% conversion rate — sit within touching distance of the numbers above, because the selected period is most of what there is. The period after it was only two days old at the time of writing. We are describing one measured window, not projecting a year.

What it changes on the tools

46 enquiries in twelve trading days is a business thinking about a second van, not about where the next job is coming from. That is the difference between chasing work and choosing it — taking the jobs that suit the crew and the route, rather than accepting whatever comes through the door because the week looks thin.

Daily consistency is the part an owner actually feels. Something landing on 11 of 12 days means the roster stops being a guess, and an apprentice can be put on with a straight face.

Phone calls matter for a different reason. Twenty-eight of the fifty-four enquiries came in by phone, and in emergency plumbing a call is about the closest thing to a booked job you can get before anyone quotes. It also means somebody has to be there to answer it, which moves the constraint from marketing to operations. Most tradespeople would rather have that constraint.

We do not have visibility over Plumb SA's close rate or job values, so we are not going to invent a revenue number. The enquiries were real, they were counted, and the plumbers had to answer them.

Start a conversation

If you run a plumbing or drainage business in Adelaide and your advertising is generating clicks rather than call-outs, we should talk.

Tell us what you are spending and what you are getting back. We will tell you what we think is possible, honestly, and without a forecast we cannot stand behind.