Worked scenario · clicks from budget
A plumber's £500 a month
By Oliver Wakefield-Smith, Digital Signet. Updated July 2026.
£500 a month at a £2.40 average CPC buys 208 clicks. That is the whole calculation: budget divided by cost per click. What those clicks turn into is the part worth working through, so this page runs the maths both ways: your own dashboard numbers, and the 2026 US home-services benchmark.
Ticket one: your own numbers
Start from what your dashboard shows, not a benchmark. If your account averages £2.40 a click:
Lot 01 · measured CPC
A conversion rate is the share of clicks that become an enquiry: a call, a form, a WhatsApp message. The 5-10% band is a planning range; the 2026 cross-industry average is 8.18% LocaliQ, 2026 data. Your own rate replaces it after your first full month. The click-to-customer bridge is unpacked on clicks to customers.
Ticket two: the category benchmark
The US Home & Home Improvement category, which includes plumbing, averages $8.33 per search click in 2026 LocaliQ, 2026 data. Benchmark figures are USD as sourced, so this ticket runs in dollars; the arithmetic transfers to any currency.
Lot 02 · category median, USD
Same budget, less than a third of the clicks. That is what a premium category CPC does, and why UK plumbers seeing clicks in the £2 to £4 band are not underperforming the dataset. Category context on the home-services benchmark page.
Cost per booked job
Not every enquiry books. Assume you win half of them; that is a working assumption for you to replace, not a market statistic. On ticket one, 10 to 20 enquiries become roughly 5 to 10 jobs, so each job costs £50 to £100 in ad spend. Against a £150 emergency call-out or a £3,000 bathroom, both ends of that range can pay. Against a £60 washer swap, neither does. Price the job, not the click.
If the numbers disappoint
Change one thing at a time, in this order: tighten match types so you stop paying for irrelevant searches, cut non-converting keywords, then work on Quality Score. Each lever is worked through on how to lower CPC. To rerun this page's maths with your own budget and CPC, use the calculator, pre-filled with this scenario. Different trade, same method: the dentist scenario works a £1,000 budget.