If you are already spending $10,000 or more a month on Google Ads, small structural problems stop being small. I help HVAC and plumbing companies cut wasted spend and turn more paid clicks into booked jobs, not just ringing phones.
Results from one HVAC and plumbing engagement in Houston, Texas, May 2025 to February 2026. Client name withheld at their request.
Send me the account and I will tell you where the money is going. Fixed scope, plain language, and the findings are yours either way.
Clicks in this vertical run $45 to $80. At that price a structural mistake is not an inefficiency, it is the difference between a profitable channel and an expensive one. These are the five I find most often.
With broad match and smart bidding, the search terms report is the campaign, not the keyword list. This is the single most common place I find money going out the door in home services accounts.
Radius targeting set once and never revisited, or location settings that include people merely interested in your area rather than located in it. You pay $60 a click for a job you cannot take.
Most accounts count a phone call as a conversion. A call is not revenue. If tracking does not tell you whether that call became a booked job, Google is optimising toward whatever makes the phone ring, including the calls you do not want.
A burst pipe at 2am and a planned system replacement are different buyers, different urgency and different value. Bidding on them together means one subsidises the other and you cannot see which.
Without sending booked jobs back into the account, the algorithm never learns which clicks turned into work. It optimises for the cheapest lead, which is rarely the most profitable one.
Confidential client, Houston, Texas. HVAC and plumbing. Freelance engagement, May 2025 to February 2026, managing roughly $20,000 per month in Google Ads.
The situation. Extreme keyword competition with clicks at $45 to $80, dozens of local competitors bidding the same terms, and seasonal demand swings that made month to month lead flow look random.
What changed. Negative keyword work to stop the bleed on search terms that were never going to book, a full funnel restructure that separated demand types instead of averaging them, and ongoing testing of ad copy against landing pages rather than in isolation.
Result. Cost per acquisition down 44% and qualified leads up 60% over the engagement.
Send me your account and I will tell you where I think the money is going. Fixed scope, plain language, and the findings are yours whether or not we work together. If the account is already well run I will say that too, which is the part a free audit can never afford to tell you.