Sydney plumbing leads: 158 enquiries in a 23-day period for Wilco Plumbing

Why a plumbing click in Sydney costs what it does

Sydney plumbing produces some of the most expensive clicks a trade business will ever buy, and the reason is straightforward. The job at the end of a plumbing search might be a $200 tap washer or a $12,000 drain replacement. Everybody bidding is pricing against the chance of the big one, which pushes the cost of that moment up for everyone — including the plumber who was only ever going to get the tap.

Speed is the second thing to understand. A blocked drain, a burst pipe, no hot water on a Sunday: bought in minutes, by someone who will ring the first plumber who looks capable of turning up. No research phase, no shortlist. Competition piles into a very small set of high-intent searches and prices them hard, while the browsing and the comparing and the people six weeks away from doing anything stay comparatively cheap and comparatively worthless.

Then there is the gap between an enquiry and a booked job, which in plumbing is wide. Most enquiries are phone calls, and phone calls include price-checkers, landlords collecting quotes for an insurer, and people who have already rung three others. An account that produces plenty of enquiries and no work is an expensive way to keep somebody on the phone.

Wilco Plumbing needed the account to do two things that usually pull against each other. Produce enough enquiries to keep a team busy week after week. And stop the cost of each one drifting upward as the spend went up. That second half is where most plumbing accounts come unstuck, because scaling is easy if you are willing to accept a worse cost per enquiry every time you add budget. Holding the line while volume climbs is the hard version.

What we took on

What follows is one measured window out of the account, left undated on purpose so nothing here says when this business trades. Taken over the whole account rather than that one stretch, it was served 38,895 times, drew 1,920 clicks at a 4.94% click-through rate and recorded 257 enquiries. One campaign carried the bulk of it — 214 of those enquiries at $126.99 each.

Our attention went almost entirely to one distinction: a search that sounds like plumbing versus a search that is a job. Someone comparing hot water system brands and someone with water coming through a ceiling use the same words, and only one of them justifies a premium click. Most of the improvement came from getting steadily better at telling those two apart, and from writing ads that speak to the job in front of the customer rather than to the category.

The number we actually watch on an account like this is not the monthly total. It is whether the phone rings on a Tuesday as well as on a Monday.

On the large majority of the days this account traded, something landed in the inbox.

A pipeline that turns up in two big lumps and then goes quiet for a fortnight cannot be rostered against. This one could.

158 enquiries at $133.23 each

This was the account's best complete month. Across 23 days it produced 158 enquiries at $133.23 each, from 1,126 clicks and 25,026 impressions, with 14.03% of clicks converting into an enquiry. The month before it ran 18 days and produced 83 enquiries at $145.95 each from 689 clicks and 11,634 impressions, converting at 12.05%.

Those two columns are complete months set beside each other, not a good fortnight against a bad one. Red is the earlier month at $145.95 an enquiry. Green is the later one at $133.23, which is 8.72% cheaper.

The line has only two points on it, and we would rather show that plainly than pad it out. What it shows is a downward slope in the one direction that matters, achieved in the month when volume nearly doubled.

Same story from the other side in the bars: 241 tracked enquiries across the two complete months, 83 in the earlier one and 158 in the later. The later month was the longer of the two in the account, 23 days against 18. It was not only longer, though. The daily rate rose as well as the total, which is why the cost came down instead of holding flat.

• 158 enquiries across a 23-day period in 2026
• $133.23 cost per enquiry in that period, down 8.72% from $145.95 in the month before
• 14.03% of clicks became enquiries in that period, against 13.39% across the account's wider run
• 25,026 impressions and 1,126 clicks in that period
• 257 enquiries in total over the wider account, at a blended $136.59 each

An 8.72% reduction is not a dramatic number and we are not going to dress it up as one. It is a real one, measured between two complete months rather than plucked from a good fortnight, and it happened while volume was rising — the harder direction to move in.

The opening days of the month after continued the same way: 16 enquiries at $121.23 each across 2 days, converting at 15.24%. Two days is not a month and we will not present it as one. Measured from the earlier complete month through to those first few days, cost per enquiry is 16.94% lower and the click-to-enquiry rate 26.49% higher. A partial reading of a partial month, offered as exactly that.

Of the 257 enquiries, 203 were phone leads and 54 were submitted forms, which fits the trade exactly. Mobile supplied 1,137 of the 1,920 clicks and produced 139 enquiries; desktop supplied 740 clicks and produced 114. Desktop converted at the better rate, which is a reminder that a fair share of Sydney plumbing work gets sourced by somebody sitting at a desk. A strata manager. An office manager. A landlord who has just had a tenant ring. The single strongest day in the account returned 16 enquiries from 59 clicks.

One figure cuts against the flattering reading, so here it is. The campaign carrying most of the volume held 22.68% impression share over the window. Most of the market was still going past. Everything above happened on roughly a fifth of the available searches.

What changed for the business

158 enquiries in a month turns a sales problem into a scheduling problem. The value is not only in the total, either — it is in the arrival pattern, because enquiries landing on most trading days is what lets an owner roster crews with some confidence instead of reacting to whatever the week brings.

Cost movement compounds quietly. Holding a lower cost per enquiry while volume grows means the next increase in budget buys more than the last one did, and the account stops quietly penalising the business for wanting to get bigger. An advertising line with a ceiling and one without are very different things to own.

Owners tend to notice a second-order effect before they can name it. Once cost per enquiry is known and stable — $133.23 in the measured period — the rest of the arithmetic becomes answerable. What share of enquiries becomes a booked job. What the average job is worth. Whether the next van and the next apprentice pay for themselves. We do not have those numbers and we are not going to invent them. The point is that a measured cost per enquiry is the input that makes the whole calculation possible, and most plumbing businesses are running without it.

Want the same read on your account?

Plumbing accounts that grow while their cost per enquiry drifts upward are the norm rather than the exception, and most owners only notice once the monthly invoice stops matching the job board. If that sounds familiar, we will go through your account with you and show you where the money is going.