Short answer
There is no national figure worth quoting. A plumbing click can cost a few pounds in a quiet town or well over twenty in a competitive city at 7pm. What matters is your own cost per booked job measured against what a job is worth to you.
This is the first question nearly every plumber asks about Google Ads, and the honest answer is unsatisfying: it depends entirely on where you work. What I can give you is a way to work out your own number, which is more useful than any average.
Three different numbers, often confused
Cost per click. What you pay when somebody clicks the ad. Nothing more.
Cost per lead. What you paid, divided by how many people rang or filled in the form.
Cost per booked job. What you paid, divided by how many of those turned into actual work.
Only the third one matters, and it is the one almost nobody measures. A cheap click that never rings is not cheap, it is wasted.
What actually moves the price
How many plumbers are bidding. This is most of it. A city with six firms competing for emergency plumber is a different market to a town with one.
Time and urgency. Searches late in the evening cost more because they convert better. Somebody searching at 9pm with water coming through a ceiling is not comparing quotes.
What the job is worth. Searches that signal a big job attract higher bids, because the people bidding can afford them.
Your landing page. Google charges you less when your page genuinely matches the search. Sending every click to your home page costs money twice, once in wasted clicks and again in a worse price per click.
How to work out your own number
You do not need the account running to do most of this.
- Work out your average job value, or better, your average margin per job.
- Decide what you would happily pay to win one. For most plumbers the answer sits somewhere between a tenth and a fifth of the margin.
- Run a small budget for a month with proper call and form tracking from day one.
- Divide the spend by the booked jobs. That is your real number, and it describes your town rather than a national average.
Month one will look worse than month three, because the account has no data yet and is still learning which searches are worth showing for.
Why the first month always looks expensive
New accounts waste money. It is unavoidable, and anybody telling you otherwise is managing your expectations rather than your account.
The first few weeks buy information: which searches convert, which are rubbish, what time of day is worth bidding on. That information is what makes month three cheaper. Judging ads on month one is like judging a job by the first hour on site.
The number that should actually worry you
Not the cost per click. The gap between enquiries and booked jobs.
If clicks are reasonable and enquiries are coming but nothing converts, the problem is not the ads. It is what happens when the phone rings, or what the website says when they land, or how fast you get back to people. Spending more on ads at that point just buys more of the same disappointment.
That is why tracking goes in before the ads do rather than after. Without it you cannot tell a traffic problem from a conversion problem, and they need completely different fixes.
If you want a realistic floor for your own town before committing to anything, that is a free conversation.