Most plumbers think of a missed call as a lost job. That is only half the story. If you run Google ads, that call cost you money before you even heard it ring. You paid to make the phone ring. Then nobody picked up. That is the same pound spent twice: once on the ad, once on the job it should have won.

You are paying for calls, not clicks

It helps to see what your ad money actually buys.

With normal Google ads, you pay for a click, a tap on your ad that takes someone to your website or dials your number. With Local Services Ads, the green ticks at the very top, you often pay for the lead itself: the call or the message.

Either way, the person on the other end is not browsing. Someone searching "emergency plumber near me" at 9pm has water where water should not be. They are the best kind of customer you will ever get: they have the problem now, they have their card out, and they rang you.

So when that call rings out, you have not lost a maybe. You have lost a yes, and you paid for the introduction.

What the ring-outs cost. In your numbers.

Made-up figures, on purpose. Swap in your own from your ads account.

Say your ads make the phone ring 40 times a month.
Say each of those calls costs you £20 in ad spend.
Say you miss 1 call in 4, because you are on the tools.

10 missed calls x £20 = £200 a month burned on calls nobody answered.

That is only the ad money. Now add the jobs.

Say half of those 10 missed calls were real jobs.
Say your average job is worth £300.

5 x £300 = £1,500 a month in work that rang the next plumber.

Ad money + lost jobs = £1,700 a month. Over £20,000 a year.

Not our numbers, and not a promise. But the shape of the sum is right, and only you can fill it in properly. The point is that the ad spend makes every missed call more expensive, because you bought the ring.

How to find your real number

You do not have to guess. Google keeps score.

  • In Google Ads: look for call reporting, the report that lists every call your ads produced, how long it lasted, and whether it was answered. A duration of zero or a few seconds usually means it rang out or hit voicemail.
  • In Local Services Ads: open your lead inbox. Every lead is listed, and the missed ones are marked. You may have been charged for some of them anyway.
  • On your phone: your missed-call list for the last 30 days, checked against your ads schedule. Calls that arrived while you were mid-job are the pattern to look for.

Do this once and you will know your answer rate, the share of calls that get picked up. Most plumbers have never checked it. Almost everyone is surprised by it.

Three ways to stop the leak

Be honest about the options, including the ones that cost nothing.

Option one: only run ads when you can answer. Google lets you schedule ads by hour and day. If you cannot pick up on Tuesdays because you are always under a floor, do not pay for calls on Tuesdays. Free, takes ten minutes, and it stops the worst of the waste today. Where it falls down: emergencies do not follow your diary, and the hours you switch off are often the hours the best jobs come in.

Option two: put more people on the phone. A partner, an office person, or a human answering service picks up when you cannot. Better than voicemail, genuinely. Where it falls down: a person costs the same whether the phone rings or not, and a message pad is not a booking. Someone still has to ring everyone back.

Option three: an answering system that books. A system that picks up every call, day and night, asks the right questions, sorts a burst pipe from a dripping tap, and books the job into your diary. This is the kind of thing we build, so weigh our opinion accordingly. It makes the most sense when the sums above come out ugly, because it turns ad money you were burning back into booked work.

Our honest recommendation: do the check first, then option one today regardless, because free is free. If your answer rate turns out fine, stop there and keep your money. If you are missing 1 call in 4 or worse while paying for ads, the leak is big enough to fix properly.

Do this today

  • Open your ads account and pull the call report for last month. Count the calls with a duration under ten seconds. That is your ring-out count.
  • Multiply it by what you pay per call or per click. That is the ad money you burned on silence.
  • Set an ad schedule that matches the hours someone can actually answer, even roughly. You can widen it again when the phone is covered.

None of that needs us, and all of it is worth doing this week.

If you would rather not dig through the ads account yourself, send us last month's spend and your missed-call list. We will put a number on what the ring-outs cost you, in twenty minutes, and tell you honestly whether it is worth fixing. If it is not, we will say so.