Plumbing Advertising: Google Paid Search

Paid search advertising enables plumbing & heating businesses to engage with users who have shown a specific interest in the services they offer by displaying text ads in response to Google searches. By knowing the right search terms to display ads on, firms can meet demand in real-time, offering their services to in-market users on search engines.

In a nutshell, paid search works by driving high-intent users from Google (and other search engines) to an advertiser’s website, where the user can then carry out the desired action (e.g., submit a lead). One of the many benefits of traditional paid search advertising is that, generally, a cost is only incurred when a user clicks on an ad, hence pay-per-click, or PPC. This means that plumbing advertisers only pay for high-quality, intent-based traffic. More recently, Google has released Local Search Ads, that charge advertisers only for leads generated. Both campaign types offer substantial benefits to plumbing and heating businesses.

Though trade directory sites offer businesses with perfectly viable means of acquiring customers, users are increasingly turning to search engines to find local services. According to Google, an average of 110,000 searches for ‘plumbers near me’ were made every month in the UK alone in 2022, up 16% on the previous year. ‘Best plumbers near me’ saw searches rise by 133% YoY, and searches for ‘emergency plumber near me’ rose by 124% in December 2022 vs 2021. Meanwhile, search demand for ‘Checkatrade’ reduced by 17% last year, with ‘Trusted Trader’ down 19%.

The sophistication of Google Ads has increased significantly in recent years, enabling plumbing advertisers to utilise AI/machine learning to maximise their return on investment. Such technological advancements have only served to enhance paid search’s proposition, cementing it as one of the most effective customer acquisition advertising channels for local businesses. Intent, location, demographics, device and browsing history are just a few of the many signals that Google uses to determine the likelihood of each user meeting campaign objectives. What’s more, advertisers can set cost-per-acquisition targets that Google is tasked with hitting – the platform then sets about achieving these targets by utilising the signals mentioned above.

Another great strength of paid search advertising is spend control. No minimum spends, daily budget caps and the ability to pause activity without notice mitigates the threat of overspending, while the array of performance data available through correct tracking implementation means that every penny spent can be accounted for. These two factors enable plumbing & heating businesses to better understand their return on investment, while being safe in the knowledge that they can stop spending when required, e.g if operating at capacity without the need for more business.

Of course, there are conditions that need to be met in order to maximise both the effectiveness and efficiency of paid search. The first of which is to ensure that the account is well managed, utilising best-practice account structure, appearing on high value search terms and deploying the right optimisation strategies. The second is having a user-friendly plumbing website that’s compatible on both mobile and desktop. The absence of such a site can lead to a poor user-experience, which may ultimately prohibit plumbing lead generation and result in wasted budget.

With search demand for plumbing & heating engineers on Google increasing in recent years, coupled with the highly sophisticated optimisation capabilities available via Google Ads, it’s no wonder that increasing numbers of firms are investing in paid search to help grow their businesses in 2023.