Service bookings more than doubled and cost per new customer halved over the winter season, on a budget of about £500 a month.
Thames Plumbing Co. is a local plumbing service based in London, UK. I worked on the account from January to April 2025, across Google Search, local Performance Max, the Google Business Profile and Meta lead ads.
Service bookings a month, up from 34.
New customers a month from ads, up from 12.
Lower cost per new customer, from £37.50 to £18.40.
More direction requests on Maps, from 210 to 520 a month.
What wasn’t working.
Thames Plumbing relied on flyers and local directories. The Business Profile had old photos and the wrong hours, service requests arrived in emails and were often missed, and nobody could tell which ad had brought a customer in.
- Invisible on Maps. They were losing emergency calls because their profile rarely showed up for “plumber near me”.
- Low-value jobs. Spend was wasted on fixing leaky taps rather than high-margin boiler installations.
- Offline black hole. The engineers took payments on-site, but that revenue data never made it back to Google Ads.
Five changes, in the order they mattered.
Google Local Services Ads
Set up and verified their profile to appear at the absolute top for high-intent emergency plumbing searches with the Google Guarantee.
Value-based bidding
Imported closed job revenue from their dispatch software into Google Ads via Zapier, teaching the algorithm to hunt for high-paying jobs.
Campaign segmentation
Split the budget to prioritize high-margin services like boiler repair and bathroom fitting, cutting spend on low-value calls.
Speed to lead
Every website enquiry instantly triggers an SMS to the on-call engineer, ensuring a quote is provided within 15 minutes.
Automated review generation
Triggered automated text messages asking for a Google review an hour after the engineer marked the job as complete in the CRM.
What changed, month by month.
More trials, cheaper members
Trial bookings a month (bars) against cost per new member (line). December is the baseline.
Actions on the Business Profile
Monthly calls, direction requests and website clicks from the Google Business Profile, December against April.
Where April’s new members came from
New memberships in April by the channel that brought them in, matched from the front-desk sheet.
Still running today
- Offline conversion sync sends completed job revenue to Google daily.
- Engineers receive instant SMS alerts for emergency form submissions.
- A cost-per-acquisition report by service type goes out every Friday.
Tell me what you’re working on.
What you want to achieve, and where you need help. We can talk it through and decide on a practical next step. I’m based in New Delhi and work with businesses across India.
