If you offer plumbing services in the UK, the chances are that you have considered Google Advertising for your business. However, it can be difficult when starting out to understand how much you should be spending on your Google Adwords budgets. 

Working Out AdWords Budget For a Plumbing Company

Firstly, it's important that you think about what a lead conversion is worth to you. As a plumber, you may offer a range of services such as emergency call outs, boiler installation or other ad hoc services. 

Think about how much each of those type of job are worth to your company. For example, say your call out charge is £100 and you include the first hour within this in which you tend to fix the issue, you can gather that a conversion is usually worth £100 to you on average. 

Therefore you need to think about how much you are happy to spend to earn a £100 lead. This will very much depend on your company type. If you are a sole trader, this may not be the best use of your budget, so you may instead want to focus on advertising larger plumbing jobs first instead of using Google AdWords to promote your emergency service. On the other hand, if you have a fleet of plumbers, this may be one of the best ways to get more business to your plumbing company. 

So, you have thought about how much you are willing to spend, it's now time to consider what 'keywords' are going to be suitable for your plumbing business. Let's say that you have decided for now to focus on emergency plumbing, and you are based in London. 

Ideally, it would be good to know what your typical conversion rates are. Conversion rates will be based on things like, how many visitors to your website actually convert to an enquiry, and then how many enquiries convert to a job. Looking at your Google Analytics will help you to understand this. 

For example say for every 100 visitors to your website page, you get 5 enquies, your conversion rate would be 5%. At this stage is it worth considering if your web pages are suitable for your advertising campaign, and what you can do to optimise your landing pages (the page to which your advert will link). 

You should also consider then how many of these enquiries convert to an actual job. For the sake of our maths - let's say 50% of enquiries result in a a job. 

Finding Keywords for a Plumbing Business

Ok, so for this example, we are going to assume that you are looking to advertise your emergency plumbing business in London. Taking a quick look at Adwords planner, we can see that the keyword emergency plumber in London has a suggested bid of a whopping £17.81. (Note that it's worth asking an AdWords expert to help you to source the best keywords for your budget). 

Therefore based on our calculations, this is how much one lead would cost you. 

1 click = £17.81

For every enquiry you will need 20 clicks - so that would cost £356.20

For each of these you would get 1 job - meaning that one lead would have a total cost of £712. 40! 

A bit too much for a one job call out of £100 right? 

Increasing conversion rate on AdWords Campaigns for Plumbers

You're probably reading the above and wondering why on earth anyone would want to use AdWords to advertise a plumbing service. 

Firstly, Google uses a range of factors when looking at how much you will pay for each click, and how often your advert will be shown.

You also need to ensure that your website or landing page is really optimised to convert. Our estimate of a 5% conversion rate can be hugely improved if the landing page layout and your service is in tip top condition. If we increased our conversion rate to 25% the same lead would cost you just £89.05. Combine that with reducing your cost per click, and the bid is looking a little more attractive. 

Choosing Appropriate Keywords For Plumbers

It's also worth bearing in mind that I have chosen a very expensive keyword choice. Going back to our keyword list, we may want to consider bidding instead on local areas which you cover, or slightly different keywords such as 24 hour plumber in (local area) or adding words such as reliable or 1 hour. In reality, your Google Adwords campaign should be made up of a mixture of high volume search keywords, and others that, while more niche should be tailored to what you provide. 

The key to working out how much you should spend on your Google PPC campaigns is to do your research first. Many ads fall at the first hurdle as you are not sending the clicks to an appropriate page on your website, or because your ad groups are not tailored to the services which your provide. 

Google Adverting, when done correctly can be an excellent value for money platform for getting leads to your business, however if it's done badly it can be a very expensive waste of your marketing budget. If you're not sure how to use AdWords, it is probably worth calling in the services of a small business AdWords expert to help you to at least get your campaigns set up. 

At The Small Biz Expert, we offer expert marketing consultancy for trades, and can help you to both set up and manage your Google Campaigns, so get in touch with us for a no obligation chat about how our services can help you. As a Google search partner, we are experts in getting traffic for trades.

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