A plumbing marketing agency that gets paid when you do

Most agencies that serve plumbers sell the same bundle: a website, search engine work so you show up when someone types "plumber near me", a managed Google Ads account, help with your Google Business Profile, and sometimes review requests. The work is real and some shops do it well. The question worth your time is how the bill is calculated.

The standard answer is a monthly retainer on a 12-month contract. Hook Agency, one of the better known trades agencies, publishes a starting price of $2,800 a month for SEO with a year commitment. That is $33,600 before you have spent a dollar on ads, and the amount does not change if the phone is quiet in month four.

The second common answer is pay per lead, where you pay a set fee for each inquiry. The third, and the one this page is about, is a share of revenue on jobs that actually got paid. Each model puts the risk of a slow month in a different place, and that is the whole decision.

Plumbing demand is urgent in a way most trades are not. A burst pipe, a backed up main line, or a dead water heater does not wait for business hours, and the homeowner is not comparing three quotes. They call the first plumber who looks trustworthy and they hire the first one who picks up.

That makes the unanswered call the most expensive leak in a plumbing shop. Invoca's analysis of 60 million calls found that 27 percent of inbound home services calls go unanswered. If your marketing agency is paid by the month or by the lead, those missed calls are your loss alone; the agency was paid either way.

This is why PayOnJobs treats the phone as part of marketing. An AI receptionist answers every call to your tracked number around the clock, takes down the problem, books the job on your calendar or hands the call to you, and texts back anyone who hung up. We do it because we are not paid unless the call turns into a paid job.

Take the retainer first. At $2,800 a month, a shop that books 20 jobs from that marketing in a month paid $140 per job in agency fees. A shop that books 5 paid $560 per job. The fee per job swings with results, but the check you write does not.

Now pay per lead. Shared marketplace leads typically run $25 to $200 each, and Hook Agency's 2026 analysis puts close rates at 13 to 20 percent on shared leads. A $60 shared lead at a 15 percent close rate works out to about $400 in lead fees for every job you book. On a drain cleaning or a faucet repair, that can be more than the job is worth.

Under a 17 percent share, a $350 service call (as an example) costs $59.50 and a $2,000 water heater replacement (as an example) costs $340. Calls that never booked cost nothing. Plumbing is mostly small and mid sized tickets at high volume, which is where a share tends to beat a price per lead. It is less clearly a win on very large jobs, which the limits section covers.

No setup fee, no monthly fee, no fee per lead. We build a website you own, set up or clean up your Google Business Profile, run a Google Ads account in your name, give you a tracked phone number, and put the AI receptionist on it. We follow up on open estimates and send the payment link when the work is done.

You fund your own Google ad spend, paid straight to Google with no markup, at a minimum of $1,500 a month. We say that plainly because it is the one cost that is not tied to results. When a customer pays through the link, the payment splits on the spot: 83 percent to you, 17 percent to us. Nobody sends an invoice and nobody argues about the count.

We sign one plumbing partner per 25-mile radius, so the ads and the site we build for you are never also working for the shop down the road. The first term is 12 months. After that either side can leave with 30 days notice, and you keep the domain, the website, the customer list, the Google Business Profile, and the reviews.

Ask who owns the website and the phone number if you leave. Many agencies own both, which means the site that ranks and the number on your trucks go away when you stop paying. Ask whether the Google Ads account is in your name and whether the agency adds a markup to your ad spend.

Ask how they count a lead, and whether they report booked jobs or only calls and form fills. Ask whether they work with another plumber in your service area. Then ask whether they would take their fee only on paid jobs. You will learn a lot from how long the pause is.

A 17 percent share is not the cheapest route for every plumber. If most of your revenue is large jobs such as repipes, sewer line replacements, or commercial contracts, and you already close well, a flat retainer you have tested or a good in-house person can cost less per job. If you have a marketing setup that reliably fills your schedule, keep it.

We are also the wrong fit if you cannot fund $1,500 a month in ad spend, if you need calls this week (the build takes about 14 days), if you want to answer every call personally, or if another plumber already holds your 25-mile area. PayOnJobs is a new company and does not publish partner results yet. Judge us on the contract terms, which are all in writing, not on promises.