Perth Plumbing & Gas Company

7,600+ tracked calls in 2026 so far, about 190 a week, with every Google Ads lead traced to a real call or form. Client name withheld at their request.

An established Perth plumbing and gas company working right across the metro area: everyday plumbing, blocked drains, gas fitting, hot water systems and emergency call-outs.

In this trade the phone is the business. Someone with a burst pipe or a cold shower does not fill in a form and wait. They call the first plumber who looks credible, and they call now.

PWD has looked after their search marketing since late 2023. They have asked us not to name them, and in a market this competitive we understand why.

Plumbing is one of the hardest local markets to advertise in. Five things made it harder:

• A tap is not a call: like most accounts, the first version of the Google Ads setup counted taps on the phone number. A tap is not a conversation, let alone a new customer, and the bidding algorithm was learning from the wrong signal.
• Repeat callers blur the picture: an existing customer ringing about an invoice looks exactly like a new job unless the two are separated.
• Timing is everything: demand peaks early in the morning and through the working day. An ad that runs when nobody can answer the phone is money down the drain.
• A crowded auction: national franchises and every local operator bid on the same “plumber near me” searches.
• Barely visible in organic search: in October 2023, just 2 of the 394 search terms we began tracking were on Google’s first page, and 343 were not in the top 100 at all.

Tracked real calls, not taps

Call tracking across the ads and the website: dynamic numbers on the site show which channel and search each caller came from, and calls from the ads’ call buttons are tracked on their own. Every call is sorted into first-time and repeat callers.

Since late 2024, Google Ads has bid on first-time callers imported straight from the call tracking. The algorithm now learns from new customers picking up the phone, not from someone tapping a number on the contact page.

Put the ads on the plumber’s clock

Campaigns are split by time of day and week (early mornings, business hours, after-hours and weekends), each with its own budget and bidding. Spend follows when people actually call and when the office can answer, with local Performance Max running alongside search.

Built the website to take the call

A rebuilt website with click-to-call at every turn and an enquiry form for each core service: blocked drains, gas fitting, hot water, emergency plumbing, leak detection and more. Each form is tracked as its own conversion, so we know which services the enquiries are for.

A page for every job

Dedicated pages for each service people actually search for (hot water, gas fitting, blocked drains, leak detection, burst pipes, toilet repairs, commercial work) and for each part of Perth the business covers, backed by three years of ongoing SEO. People search for a plumber in their own suburb, and those suburb pages now carry most of the first-page rankings. The phone rings from organic search as well as paid, and the call tracking shows both side by side.

Calls from the call tracking platform, 1 January to 7 October 2026. Google Ads figures from the ad account, 1 January to 6 October 2026, compared with the same months of 2025 where noted. Rankings from AccuRanker: the same 394 search terms tracked since October 2023, median Google position over the first week of October each year.

• 7,618 tracked phone calls this year, about 190 a week, from the ads, organic search and the website.
• 3,500 Google Ads leads: 2,781 first-time callers, 499 calls from the ads’ call buttons and around 220 web forms. Roughly one in every four ad clicks turns into a lead.
• 7,800+ Google Ads leads since January 2025, every one a real call or form rather than a tap on a number.
• Fewer missed searches: the share of searches missed for lack of budget fell from about one in four across 2025 to under one in ten from July to September 2026, and January–September leads are up 9% on last year.
• 5,470 website enquiry forms since the site was rebuilt in 2024, spam excluded.
• Organic search, three years on: first-page search terms went from 2 to 58 to 129 to 165 across October 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026. Top-three positions went from none to 58, and terms ranking anywhere in the top 100 from 51 to 264.

What has not happened yet

More leads have cost more per lead. Cost per lead for January–September is about 19% higher than the same months of 2025. Capturing the searches we used to miss means paying for harder-won clicks. It is worth it while the jobs are profitable, and it is the number we watch hardest.

The ads still appear for only around one in five eligible searches, and most of the rest is lost on ad rank rather than budget. In a crowded Perth auction, that is the next lever to pull.

Organic rankings have not risen in a straight line. First-page terms peaked at 175 in January 2026, slipped to 138 by July and are back to 165 now. The biggest national searches, like “hot water systems” on its own, are still dominated by manufacturers and big retailers.

And every lead is still worth the same to the algorithm. The account knows a first-time caller from a repeat one, but not which call became a tap washer and which became a new hot water system.

That is the honest position, not the rounded-up one.

• Bid on job value, not just calls: feed booked-job outcomes back into Google Ads so it chases hot water installs as hard as it chases call-outs.
• Win more of the auction on rank: sharper ad relevance and landing pages, so more of the one-in-five becomes two-in-five without simply paying more.
• Grow organic’s share of the calls: so paid search is a choice, not a dependency.
• AI search visibility: be the plumber an assistant recommends, not just the one a search box lists.

The engine works: calls tracked to their source, ads timed to when the phone can be answered, and bidding that learns from real new customers. The next phase is teaching it which customers are worth the most.

Want results like these? If you run a trade business where the phone is the business, we can show you which calls your marketing is actually producing, and which it isn’t. Talk to PWD.