Lead count is the easiest number to move in plumbing, and the easiest plumbing leads to generate are the cheapest jobs you do. An agency judged on volume will find you drain clears. The report will look excellent and the business will feel worse.
A plumber marketing agency handles some combination of search visibility, the Google Business Profile, reviews, the website, paid ads and lead follow-up for a plumbing company. The service list is broadly the same everywhere. What differs is which jobs their work brings you, and whether anybody agreed that upfront.
The short version
Do not hire an agency on lead count. Hire them on the work you want more of. In a trade where a single job can be worth a hundred dollars or fifteen thousand, those are completely different instructions.
None of these are dishonest. Each one is an agency doing exactly what it was asked to do.
| If the brief is | What is easiest to deliver | What you should ask instead |
|---|---|---|
| More leads | Drain clears and small repairs. High search volume, low competition for the clicks, fast to produce. | More leads for which services? Name the two you want to grow. |
| More calls | The same, plus a share of people asking questions rather than booking. | More booked jobs, measured after the call, not more ringing. |
| Better rankings | Positions on whatever is easiest to rank for, which in plumbing is usually informational. | Positions on the searches that precede the jobs you want. Which ones are those? |
| Lower cost per lead | Cheaper leads, which are cheaper because the jobs behind them are smaller. | Cost per booked job by service type. It is a harder number and the only useful one. |
| More water heater and repipe work | Harder, slower, fewer of them, and worth several times more each. | Nothing. This is the brief. |
From our own work
The previous agency delivered leads at £8.25 and jobs at roughly £524. We delivered leads at £12.35 and jobs at £302. The cheaper lead was the more expensive customer, which is why cost per lead is the wrong number to optimize.
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.
That was a home improvement contractor and a different market, so treat the figures as an illustration of the mechanism rather than a benchmark. The mechanism is the point: the agency being replaced was winning on the metric it was being judged by.
The reason this matters more in plumbing than in most trades is the ticket spread: the cheapest job and the most expensive job carry the same job title and the same search. That argument is set out in SEO for plumbers. The consequence for hiring is simple enough. If nobody names the services, the agency will optimize for whatever moves the number fastest, and that will not be the repipe.
Search for a plumber marketing agency and most of what ranks is very small, often with fewer staff than your plumbing company. Some of those are excellent. Some are a domain name and a template. Neither the website nor the ranking tells you which.
In a small specialist the answer is often one person, and that is not automatically a problem. A single experienced operator who has run fifty plumbing accounts will beat a large agency that assigns you a junior. What you are checking is whether the person you met is the person doing it, and what happens to your account during their vacation or illness.
Not a case study page, a phone call. Ask those plumbers what their average ticket did, not what their traffic did. Ask whether the agency has ever told them not to spend money. The second question is more revealing than the first.
Small specialists concentrate in a trade by definition, which makes territory overlap much more likely than with a generalist. Ask directly, and ask what happens if a competitor in your area approaches them next year. A clear answer either way is fine. A vague one is the answer.
It is tempting to judge a marketing agency by its own rankings, and it is close to meaningless. A tiny site can rank for a niche term with an exact-match domain and very little else. What matters is what they have done for plumbing companies, which is not visible in any tool you can run on them.
Ask this at signing rather than at the exit, when you have no leverage. The domain registered in your name. Independent access to hosting. The Google Business Profile with you as primary owner. The review history. Call tracking numbers you can port to another provider. Your customer records and job history. Analytics and Search Console with you as owner. The advertising accounts themselves rather than a sub-account inside theirs. And the photography and creative produced for you.
Be fair about the distinction, because it cuts both ways. Assets that are yours should stay yours. But a workflow built inside an agency's own licensed software, or a tool they pay for on your behalf, will reasonably stop when the agreement does, and expecting otherwise is not a realistic ask. The sharper question is not what transfers but what you can answer before signing: what do I own, what can be exported, what stays accessible, and what simply stops.
Ask before the contract and note which items produce hesitation. The list itself matters less than watching which line somebody does not want to answer.
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