Forty thousand people a month search for how to clear a drain with baking soda. Another fifteen thousand want enzyme products. None of them are going to call a plumber, and without a negative keyword list your ads can end up in front of them at plumbing click prices.
Google Ads for plumbers is paid advertising where a plumbing company pays per click, bidding on the searches homeowners type. Plumbing click prices are high, often above forty dollars and sometimes far more, which makes the work of excluding irrelevant searches unusually valuable in this trade.
The short version
Most plumbing accounts are built by choosing keywords. In this trade the bigger lever is deciding what you refuse to pay for, because plumbing topics attract more non-buyers than any other trade we have measured.
These are real monthly search volumes on topics directly adjacent to plumbing services. Every one of them is somebody solving the problem without you.
| Search | US monthly volume | What they are doing |
|---|---|---|
| drain cleaning baking soda and vinegar | 40,500 | Standing at the sink with the cupboard open. |
| drain cleaning enzymes | 14,800 | About to buy a bottle. |
| best drain cleaning products | 9,900 | Shopping, possibly already in a hardware store. |
| diy drain cleaning | 2,400 | Explicitly not calling anyone. |
| drain cleaning services | 8,100 | The search you are actually paying for. |
Source: Ubersuggest, United States national database, collected September 2026. Volumes are estimates.
The non-buying searches outnumber the buying one by roughly eight to one on this single topic. Broad match can reach queries Google judges related to your keywords, so without negatives there is a real route from your plumbing campaign to somebody researching a home remedy. You will not always be shown to them, and you should not have to find out by reading a search terms report in arrears.
Not a complete list, because yours depends on what you sell. A reasonable afternoon's work that usually pays for itself inside a week.
how to, diy, yourself, homemade, home remedy, hack, tutorial, step by step. The largest single category in plumbing and the one most accounts miss entirely, because nobody expects a plumbing campaign to attract people trying not to hire a plumber.
baking soda, vinegar, enzyme, drain cleaner, chemical, liquid, snake, auger, plunger, tablets. Somebody searching for a product wants a shop, not a van. Include the brand names that dominate your market.
The big-box and hardware chains by name, plus the major marketplaces. These drag in shoppers at full plumbing click prices and they are easy to miss because the retailer name looks unrelated to your service.
jobs, hiring, salary, apprenticeship, course, certification, license, school, how to become. Career searches sit uncomfortably close to trade service terms and convert at zero.
free, cheap, cheapest, low cost, grant, assistance. Worth considering rather than automatic: some companies genuinely want the budget end, and if you do, leave these in deliberately rather than by oversight.
The services you do not offer, and the property types you do not serve. A residential-only company paying for commercial and industrial searches is a common and expensive oversight, and it works in reverse too.
Then read the search terms report weekly for the first month and monthly after that. The list is never finished, and the report is the only place that tells you what you actually paid for rather than what you intended to buy.
From our own work
In the second month one video creative took £1,162 of £1,199 spend and produced 132 of 136 inquiries at £8.81 each, after the first month had delivered at £23.03 on a carousel. Moving budget onto the winner cut cost per inquiry by roughly two thirds.
Source: a LeadsFortress client, a window and door installer in west London. 60 days of Meta ads on one account. Different trade and market to US home services.
A home improvement contractor on Meta rather than a plumber on Google, so the platforms and the trade both differ. The transferable part is the discipline: the account was not improved by adding budget, it was improved by moving the budget that already existed onto the thing that was working.
A clean negative list stops you paying for the wrong people. It does nothing about the right ones. Getting both halves right in order is the whole premise of the Growth Accelerator. At plumbing click prices, every visitor who arrives and leaves is an expensive loss, and the two most common reasons are the same on every account: the ad points at a homepage rather than a page about the thing they searched for, and the phone is not answered when they call.
Match the destination to the search. Somebody who typed water heater replacement should land on a page about water heater replacement, with the detail that decision needs. Sending them to a homepage asks them to find it themselves, which at eighty dollars a click is the most expensive request on the internet.
And the ad can only make the phone ring. What happens next sits in capture, and at these prices a missed call is not a missed call. It is money you have already spent, making a phone ring in an empty room.
The Growth Score checks all five engines against your business, including what happens to a call once your ad has paid for it, and estimates what each gap is worth per month. Free, and yours whether we work together or not.
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