Google Ads for HVAC and plumbing in Houston
Campaign management in an intensely competitive market, with challenges in geographic targeting, seasonality and services of very different value.
The facts
- Client
- Residential HVAC and plumbing company, Houston, Texas
- Role
- Freelance specialist, working directly with the business
- Period
- May 2025 to February 2026
- Platforms
- Google Ads and Performance Max
- Performance data
- Confidential by contract
I managed Google Ads and Performance Max campaigns for a residential services company in Houston, in the United States. It was one of the biggest challenges of my career.
The challenge
Competition in this market is fierce. Clicks are expensive, and every test needs care in which campaigns run and how the budget is split.
The same search could bring someone who needed a simple repair or someone who needed a very high ticket job. So looking only at contact volume or at the average cost did not answer the question.
Choosing ZIP codes also mattered a great deal. You had to choose well where to advertise, but the areas with the most potential were exactly where the CPC could be even higher.
And there was seasonality. Demand changed through the year, above all between air conditioning and heating. Campaign priorities had to follow those shifts.
It took time to get the campaigns right. It was not easy.
What I did
I kept adjusting services, areas and the budget split as results came in. The work meant testing, monitoring and revisiting decisions to find combinations that made sense for that operation.
It was also important to understand how generic and brand campaigns related to each other. Someone could discover the company while searching for a service and come back later searching for its name. Judging those campaigns in isolation could leave part of that contribution out.
How I tracked results
I tracked cost per conversion, conversion rates and the records of calls and bookings, by the service searched for, the area and the time of year.
This project deepened my experience with competitive local markets. Every decision had to weigh the cost of bringing in a contact against the chance of that contact becoming a job that justified the spend.
Confidentiality
The performance data from this project is confidential by contract. That is why I do not publish amounts, volumes or percentages.
In this account I share my role, the challenges and the lessons, while keeping the client's internal information private.
Related services
The service page for this kind of account is HVAC marketing, and there are pages for plumbing and home services. The usual starting point is a fixed price PPC audit.