What should a Melbourne plumber spend on Google Ads?
There is no monthly figure that answers this for every plumbing business, and anyone quoting one has skipped the only step that matters: what you want the advertising to produce. This page works backwards from a revenue target instead, using the $74.42 cost per enquiry published on the Melbourne plumbing account we run.
The numbers, already filled in
Cost per enquiry is pre-filled at $74.42 — the figure published on Your Pro Plumber, the Melbourne plumbing account in our case studies. The revenue target, job value and close rate are starting points, not claims about your business; overwrite all three.
What that comes to
Updates as you type, in your browser. Nothing leaves this page unless you ask us to send you the report.
Monthly ad budget
$8,613
$103,361 over twelve months
Change a number and this link updates with it, so whoever opens it lands on the result you are looking at.
Jobs needed
416.7
34.7 a month
Enquiries needed
1,389
116 a month
Budget as a share of revenue
20.7%
Advertising only — no agency fee, no tools
Cost to win one job
$248.07
$74.42 per enquiry ÷ 30% close rate
Send me this result
We will turn the numbers above into a PDF with your figures, the workings and what they mean — and either hand it to you here or send it over.
What to do with this
- To bill $500,000 you need 416.7 jobs, which needs 1,389 enquiries, which costs $103,361 at $74.42 each.
- That is $8,613 a month and 20.7% of the revenue it is meant to produce. Every job costs $248.07 to win before you have done any of the work.
- Fund the first two months as setup rather than as a twelfth of the year each. Accounts do not arrive at their settled cost per enquiry immediately, and the early figure is always the worse one.
How this was worked out
- Jobs needed
- $500,000 ÷ $1,200.00 = 416.7 jobs
- Enquiries needed
- 416.7 ÷ 30% = 1,389 enquiries
- Total budget
- 1,389 × $74.42 = $103,361
- Monthly budget
- $103,361 ÷ 12 = $8,613
- Share of revenue
- $103,361 ÷ $500,000 = 20.7%
The same target at three costs per enquiry
| Cost per enquiry | Total budget | Monthly | Share of revenue |
|---|---|---|---|
| $8.91 — our cheapest published account | $12,375 | $1,031 | 2.5% |
| $74.42 — your figure | $103,361 | $8,613 | 20.7% |
| $112.56 — our median for the trade you picked | $156,333 | $13,028 | 31.3% |
| $220.59 — our most expensive published account | $306,375 | $25,531 | 61.3% |
The cheapest and dearest rows are the two ends of our own published book — 34 Australian accounts across 13 trades, measured in 2026. They are a range from selected work, not a market average, and no business should plan on landing at either end.
Where these numbers come from
Why the answer is a calculation and not a number
Every version of this question that gets asked out loud is really three questions wearing one coat: what does an enquiry cost, how many enquiries become paid work, and how much is a job worth to you. Change any one of them and the budget moves by thousands. A plumber winning one job in two off $1,800 invoices needs a fraction of the spend of a plumber winning one in five off $600 call-outs, and no published figure can know which of those you are.
So the only honest way to answer it is backwards. Decide the revenue you want the advertising to produce, divide by your average job value to get jobs, divide by your close rate to get enquiries, and multiply by what an enquiry costs. The calculator below does exactly that, and shows the arithmetic with your own numbers substituted in.
Where the cost-per-enquiry figure comes from
The one number on this page that is not yours is cost per enquiry, and it is pre-filled at $74.42. That is the figure published on Your Pro Plumber, the Melbourne plumbing account in our case studies, over its measured period at a 17.58% click-to-enquiry rate.
Read it as one business's result rather than a Melbourne rate. Across the 10 plumbing accounts we publish, cost per enquiry runs from $57.21 to $176.78 with a median of $112.56 — a spread of more than three times, between businesses selling the same service in the same country. The account this page is built on also blends to $127.07 across its full run, well above its measured-period figure, which is the clearest possible reminder that a single window is a single window.
There is no published Australian benchmark for any of this. Every Australian cost-per-lead page we checked either states no methodology or admits its figures are United States data adjusted by feel, so the only Australian numbers in this suite are our own, and they are labelled as ours everywhere they appear.
What to do with the budget the calculator gives you
Treat the output as a floor for the test rather than a monthly commitment. A budget that produces fewer than about fifteen enquiries a month gives you a cost per lead that moves several dollars on one unusual week, which is how businesses end up rebuilding an account that was working fine.
Then check the second number the calculator prints: budget as a share of the revenue it has to produce. If that share is uncomfortable, the fix is almost never a bigger budget. It is usually the close rate — the quote nobody chased, the call that rang out at 4pm — and that costs nothing to improve.
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Book a callIt depends entirely on what a job is worth to you, but the arithmetic is quick. At the $74.42 cost per enquiry published on our Melbourne plumbing account, $2,000 buys roughly 27 enquiries a month. At a 30% close rate that is about 8 jobs, and at a $1,200 average invoice about $9,600 of revenue — so the spend is around 21% of the revenue it produced. Whether that works depends on your gross margin. Change the job value to your own and the calculator on this page recalculates all of it.
Because it is one account, not a city average, and we are not going to present it as one. The Melbourne plumbing account we publish sits at $74.42; the Sydney plumbing accounts in the same table run from $68.34 to $140.84. That spread is mostly about which searches each account buys and how quickly the phone gets answered, not about the city. We publish the range precisely so nobody reads a single row as a rate.
No. This page works out media spend — the money that goes to Google. Management fees, call tracking and CRM costs sit on top and they change the picture materially: on a small account they can be a third of the total. The cost per booked job calculator adds all of it up and divides by jobs rather than leads, which is the figure that actually belongs next to your margin.
Ask the next question
The full calculator takes any numbers you like, and these worked pages answer the questions this one tends to raise.
Worked scenario · Electrical · Sydney
What an electrician pays per lead in Sydney
See what a Sydney electrical enquiry costs, pre-filled from a published account at $65.01 and compared against all 4 electrical accounts we run.
Worked scenario · Budget · Australia
What $100 a day on Google Ads buys a trade business
Turn $100 a day into clicks, enquiries and jobs as a banded range, using conversion rates measured across the accounts we run.
Now do it with
your real numbers.
This page is honest about being a worked example. If you want the version built on your own account — what an enquiry actually costs you, what survives to become a job, and which part of the chain is leaking — send us the account and we will read it.