Melbourne plumbing leads at $74.42 — a 10-day period

Why a plumbing lead in Melbourne costs what it costs

Melbourne is an expensive place to buy plumbing enquiries, and the reason is arithmetic rather than mystique. A blocked drain, a dead hot water unit, a pipe letting go under a slab — nobody shops those around. The customer wants it fixed today, the job is worth real money, and every plumbing business in the city already knows both of those things.

So the price of a click is not set by what a click is worth in the abstract. It is set by what the job behind the click is worth to whoever wins it. Where a drain excavation or a full hot water changeover runs into four figures, that number is high, and it stays high all year.

The inner-east and bayside suburbs are the most contested part of that market, and they are also where the better jobs live. Older housing stock, higher property values, owners who approve the proper fix instead of the patch. Everyone bids there. Nobody bids cheaply.

That is the market Your Pro Plumber walked into, and nothing about it rewards a business that turns up hoping to be noticed.

Plumbing is a phone business, and the data says so

Of the 101 enquiries this account recorded, 84 arrived as phone leads and 15 as submitted forms, with a further 2 placed as calls directly from the ad. 74 of the 101 came from someone holding a mobile phone, against 27 from a desktop.

Picture who that actually is. Somebody standing in a wet laundry, making a decision in under a minute, ringing whoever looks most likely to pick up. Advertising cannot fix what happens after they dial. It only decides how many of those moments your business is present for.

What Your Pro Plumber needed

A plumbing business coming into Melbourne cold is usually facing one of two problems. It cannot get enough enquiries to keep the vans busy, or it can get them but not at a price a plumbing margin will carry. This one needed both halves solved at the same time.

The account ran across three campaigns. Everything below is measured on selected periods with the dates taken off, so none of it tells you when the work started or how long it has run. Account-wide the ads served 12,151 impressions, earned 652 clicks at a 5.37% click-through rate, and produced 101 recorded enquiries at a blended $127.07 each. Taken over the whole account, 15.49% of clicks became an enquiry.

Four periods from 2026 are represented in that data, and only two of them — the middle pair — are complete months. The first and the last are part-periods, cut short at one end. That matters when you read the rest of this, so we will come back to it rather than quietly average it away.

The work itself was a rebuild around the enquiries that turn into booked jobs. Plumbing searches look similar on the surface and behave nothing alike underneath. Some are people who will book within the hour. Some are pricing a job they intend to do months from now. Some will never book at all, from anyone, at any price. Separating those groups, then writing to the specific job in front of the customer instead of to the trade in general, is where the whole result comes from.

Twelve thousand impressions is not a large footprint, and that was deliberate. In a market this expensive, reach is not the scarce resource. Relevance is.

The cheapest period was the earliest: $74.42 an enquiry in 2026

That period ran 10 days in 2026 and produced 16 enquiries at $74.42 each, from 91 clicks and 1,711 impressions. Just over one click in six became an enquiry — a 17.58% conversion rate.

The line chart plots only periods of 14 days or more, which is why the first and the last are missing from it. At 10 and 9 days respectively they are part-months, and putting them on the same axis as a full month would flatter one end and punish the other. What is left is the fair comparison: $104.47 an enquiry in the 19-day period, $139.44 in the 23-day one.

The bars underneath explain the shape of that line. The 19-day period in 2026 produced 25 enquiries. The 23-day period produced 50 — exactly double, in a window four days longer. Cost per enquiry rose because the account was asked to go and find twice as many people, and in Melbourne the twenty-sixth to fiftieth enquiry always costs more than the first twenty-five.

Every period we measured in 2026, unedited

• The earliest period (10 days): 16 enquiries at $74.42 each, 17.58% conversion rate, 91 clicks from 1,711 impressions
• The one after it (19 days): 25 enquiries at $104.47 each, 13.51% conversion rate, 185 clicks from 3,737 impressions, 4.95% click-through rate
• The one after that (23 days): 50 enquiries at $139.44 each, 16.34% conversion rate, 306 clicks from 5,536 impressions
• The last (9 days, cut short at the end): 10 enquiries from 70 clicks
• Account-wide: 101 enquiries at a blended $127.07, 15.49% conversion rate, 5.37% click-through rate

Two movements inside those rows are worth pulling out. The conversion rate went from 13.51% in the 19-day period of 2026 to 16.34% in the 23-day one, a 20.92% improvement in the share of clicks that became an enquiry, achieved in the very period the volume doubled. Over a similar stretch the click-through rate climbed from 4.95% to 6.12%, up 23.6%. More people found the ad worth clicking, and more of the ones who clicked found the business worth contacting.

Both the cheap period and the dear one are published here on purpose, because the honest version of this story is more useful to you than the flattering one. The cheapest enquiries came early, at low volume. When the account was pushed for scale in the 23-day period it delivered the most enquiries it ever produced, and the price of each one went up to get there.

$74.42 is what an enquiry cost when the account was running at 16 a month. $139.44 is what it cost when it was running at 50. Both are true.

That is not a failure. It is the trade every service business has to price for itself. Cheap leads and lots of leads are two different purchases, and anyone who tells you they always arrive together is selling you something.

What 50 enquiries in a month does to a plumbing business

Fifty enquiries is a full diary. For a plumbing business that is the difference between chasing work and choosing work — being able to decline the low-value jobs because there is something better sitting in the queue behind them.

Staffing also stops being a guess and becomes a sum. When 84 of your 101 enquiries arrive by phone, the constraint on the business is no longer marketing, it is whoever picks up. A month at that rate is roughly two enquiries a working day landing on someone's handset, most of them from people who will not leave a message. Knowing that in advance is the difference between hiring for it and being buried by it.

The earliest period matters for a different reason: it shows what the efficient end of the range looks like. Hold that figure in your head when you are deciding how hard to push a budget in a given month, because which end you want depends entirely on whether your problem right now is margin or capacity.

Then there is the thing trades work rarely gets — money you can predict. Once you know an enquiry cost $74.42 in your cheapest period and $139.44 in your biggest one, the advertising line in the budget stops being a leap of faith and becomes a dial. You set it against how much work you can physically absorb, not against how brave you feel in any given month.

Want to know which end of that trade you are on?

Most plumbing accounts we open are sitting at one extreme without realising it — starved of volume, or paying far too much for what they get — and in both cases the monthly report reads fine. We can tell you which one you are from your own numbers, before you commit to anything. Send the account over and we will have a proper look.