29 September 2026 · 6 min read · Oscar Markham
Gas or oil should decide how you advertise
The natural gas network covers the cities and the towns along the pipeline, and not much else. Donegal, Mayo, Kerry and large stretches of the west and midlands have no mains gas whatsoever. That single fact should shape a plumbing business's advertising more than anything else about it, and in most campaigns it is not reflected at all.
Half the country cannot buy a gas boiler service
If your campaign runs on gas boiler messaging into a county with no network, you are paying to advertise something nobody there can purchase.
It is obvious when stated and extremely common in practice, because the templates and the examples are all written for Dublin.
Say which fuel you work on, early
It is the first thing a homeowner is checking, and most plumbing sites make them hunt for it or guess.
Gas, oil, LPG, solid fuel, heat pumps — say it plainly, near the top. The registrations matter too: a customer looking for gas work wants to see you are registered for it, and one looking for oil work wants the equivalent.
Counties that straddle both need two campaigns
Cork city is on gas and most of County Cork is not. Galway city is on gas and the county is not. Running one message across the whole county means it is wrong for whichever half happens to be reading.
Splitting them is an afternoon's work and it is consistently the largest available improvement on those accounts.
The search terms are genuinely different
'Boiler service' means something different in Douglas and in Dungloe, and the modifiers people add — oil, gas, range, stove, back boiler — are the cheapest available signal of what they actually have.
Build the campaigns around those modifiers rather than around the generic term, and the quality of the enquiry changes immediately.
- Gas areas: gas boiler service, boiler replacement, RGII, gas safety
- Non-gas areas: oil boiler service, oil burner, tank, range, solid fuel
- Everywhere: heat pump service, cylinder, controls, power flush
Non-gas counties are where retrofit is moving fastest
Without a gas option, households exposed to oil prices have a stronger reason to look at heat pumps, and the grant-supported money follows.
A plumber in a non-gas county who positions for retrofit rather than only for repair is positioned where the market is going, with far less competition than in the cities.
Written by Oscar Markham, founder of Dublin Growth Digital. We run lead generation for Irish estate agents and trades, reported every Friday in enquiries and booked work.