An HVAC account is really two businesses sharing one budget. Emergency repair pays back the same week. System replacement pays back far more and takes far longer. Run them together and the campaign quietly funds the cheaper one.
The peaks take care of themselves. What separates a good account from an expensive one is what happens in April and October.
A no cooling call in July and a planned system replacement in October are not the same customer, the same urgency or the same margin. Bid them together and the platform optimises toward whichever converts faster, which is almost always the low ticket repair.
Demand doubles and halves on a schedule everyone in the trade already knows. Accounts that hold a flat monthly budget overpay in peak and go quiet exactly when the competition thins out.
HVAC enquiries arrive by call, often from a phone, often from someone who will hire the first company that answers. If those calls never reach the ad platform, the account is graded on the small share of people who filled a form instead.
Premium clicks bought for addresses your trucks will not drive to. Geography set on interest rather than presence is the most common version of this, and it is invisible in a report that only shows cost per lead.
This is the single change that moves an HVAC account the most, and it is structural rather than clever.
High intent, low ticket, decided in minutes. Wins on speed of answer and on being visible at two in the morning. Worth bidding aggressively during a heat wave and worth pulling back the moment the weather breaks.
The revenue that carries the year. Longer consideration, often several quotes, and a searcher who reads before calling. Needs remarketing and financing messaging, not urgency.
The most underrated campaign in the trade. Low click price, and every signed plan turns into replacement demand later. Rarely gets its own budget and usually should.
Different searcher, different sales cycle, different value. Mixed into a residential campaign it distorts every average in the account.
Contractors are usually sold one of these as if it replaced the others. It does not.
The only channel where you control which job type you pay for and how much. That control is why HVAC PPC is worth running even at premium click prices, and why a loose account here burns money faster than anywhere else.
Sits above the results, charges per lead and carries the Google guarantee badge, which matters when someone is choosing a stranger to enter their home. The trade off is control: you cannot separate a repair from a replacement.
Slower and cheaper per job over time. It compounds while paid search stops the day you pause it. Complements rather than competes, and the honest framing is that paid buys the months SEO has not earned yet.
Sell the same homeowner to several contractors at once. Useful for filling a slow week, and never a foundation, because you never own the source.
Measurement first. Everything else is guesswork until the phone is counted.
Calls become conversions with a duration threshold, so a wrong number does not count the same as a booked visit. Usually the largest single gap in an existing HVAC account.
Emergency, replacement, maintenance and commercial as separate campaigns with their own budgets and targets. No shared pool for the algorithm to drift inside.
Budget planned against the season rather than the calendar month, including the deliberate pullback in the shoulder weeks that most accounts never make.
Targeting by presence, radius drawn against actual drive time, and negatives for renters, DIY searches, parts buyers and job seekers.
Cost per booked job by type, imported back from the scheduling system. It is the only number that settles whether a campaign is working.
Long-form writing on this topic from the blog.
Work back from the value of a replacement job rather than from a percentage of revenue. In most markets the click price is high enough that a thin budget produces too few conversions to optimise on, which wastes the spend twice: once on the clicks and once on the learning that never happens.
It depends on whether the account can tell a booked replacement from a form fill. With that connection in place the arithmetic works comfortably, because one system pays for a lot of clicks. Without it you are paying premium prices for a number that means nothing.
Run both and measure them on the same denominator. LSA is efficient and blunt, search is controllable and demanding. Contractors who run only LSA usually cannot explain why their cost per lead moved, because there is nothing to adjust.
Deliberately, rather than by leaving the budget flat. Shoulder months are when replacement and maintenance messaging is cheapest to run and when competitors go quiet, so pacing shifts rather than stopping.
The goal is to get booked jobs back into the ad platform, whatever the system is. Even a monthly export matched by job type changes what the bidding optimises toward.
A short form beats a long discovery call. Give me the basics and I will come back with a straight read on whether I can help, usually within one business day.
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