Let's TalkLet's TalkThree different buyers, one account, and a daily budget that runs out at eleven on the hottest day of the year.
Give us read access to the account and a month of call data. We come back with the search terms taking your budget, how emergency and replacement spend is split, where the daily cap is cutting you off, and the three changes worth making first. Recorded walkthrough, no call required.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
"AC repair near me" and "heat pump replacement cost" are typed by people with completely different urgency, budget and decision length, and an account that runs them in one campaign optimises to whichever converts most often - which is the cheap repair call, not the five-figure replacement. The replacement half quietly loses its budget to the emergency half and nobody sees it happen.
On the first real heatwave, search volume for cooling triples and your account spends its daily budget before lunch. The afternoon - when the house has been hot for six hours and the homeowner has stopped hoping it will fix itself - runs without you. Budget that does not respond to a forecast is the most expensive setting in an HVAC account.
Without a maintained negative list, an HVAC account reliably pays for people looking for a capacitor, a wiring diagram, a filter size or a job. These convert as calls, they occupy your reporting, and they are worth nothing. In most accounts we audit this is the single largest line of recoverable spend and it has never been reviewed.
A conversion in the platform is a call over thirty seconds. A job is something that reaches the calendar. When the optimisation target is the first and the business runs on the second, Google will faithfully find you more of the cheapest possible phone calls - which is exactly what it is being asked to do.
Business outcomes rather than dashboard metrics. None of these is a guaranteed number - where we do guarantee something, it is written into the offer above.
The real deliverables, not a list written to make a proposal look thicker.
Not the general agency pitch. The reasons that only apply to this kind of business.
Most HVAC accounts optimise to a thirty-second phone call, which is a proxy for a job rather than a job. Google is extremely good at finding more of whatever you tell it to find, so the definition is the highest-leverage setting in the account - and it is usually the one nobody has touched since setup.
Budget and bids that move with a heat or cold event are unremarkable once configured and almost never configured. It requires watching the account on days when nothing is wrong, which is the part that does not fit a monthly reporting rhythm and is where the money is.
An HVAC negative list is never finished, because the queries change with the season and with the platform's matching. Reviewing search terms monthly is dull, unglamorous work that recovers more budget in most accounts than any bidding change we could make.
Thirty to ninety days of actual queries. The waste in an HVAC account is visible here and invisible in the campaign view.
Emergency, replacement and maintenance get their own campaigns, budgets and targets so one cannot cannibalise another.
Tie it to booked work. Until that is right, every optimisation decision after it is pointed at the wrong outcome.
A page for someone with no cooling right now and a page for someone pricing a system are not the same page.
Budget headroom and bid rules for forecast peaks, so the account does not go dark on its best afternoon.
Negatives, dayparting and budget pacing revisited every month. This is maintenance work and it compounds.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
A system replacement is worth many multiples of a service call, which means it can justify a cost per click that looks alarming next to a repair keyword. Separating them lets you bid the replacement terms at what they are actually worth instead of at an average that underfunds them into invisibility.
Plan holders call you instead of searching when something fails, which changes the economics of every other campaign in the account. A modest, continuously running enrolment campaign in the shoulder months is one of the few things in an HVAC account that reduces future acquisition cost.
Competitors bid on your name, and most HVAC accounts either ignore it or over-invest in it. It is usually worth a small, tightly controlled budget - enough that a customer searching for you by name finds you first, and not so much that you are paying to appear above your own free listing.
They charge differently, convert differently and suit different halves of the business, and blending their reporting hides which one is producing the replacement work. Running both is usually right; reporting them as one number is not.
The closest paid-search engagement we can show you is an automotive account rather than an HVAC one, and we will not imply otherwise. It earns its place for a structural reason: high-value considered purchases sitting in the same account as cheap high-volume queries, with the cheap ones absorbing budget until they were separated. That is the same account problem an HVAC contractor has between a service call and a system replacement.
Read the full case studyThe useful question is cost per booked job against your job values, because a service call and a replacement have completely different tolerances and a blended target underfunds the one that pays. We would rather establish those two numbers from your data and set separate targets than agree a single cost-per-lead figure that is wrong for half the account.
With care, and rarely as the whole account. It will find volume, and in a trade where cheap repair queries are abundant it tends to find the cheapest conversions available unless the conversion definition and exclusions are set properly first. We would generally get search structured and the negatives working before handing budget to a campaign type that reports less about where the money went.
For emergency service work they often perform very well - pay per lead, the Google Guaranteed badge, and placement above search. They give you little control over messaging, which matters much more for replacement sales where you are competing on trust and financing. Most contractors should run both and measure them apart rather than choosing.
Usually a negative keyword list that was built at launch and never revisited, combined with broad match reaching parts, DIY and job-seeker queries. It is the most common and most recoverable waste in this category. Reviewing the search terms report monthly is unexciting and it is where the budget comes back.
With budget headroom reserved in advance and bid rules ready to apply, because the account will otherwise hit its daily cap in the morning and miss the afternoon entirely. That reserve has to come from somewhere, which means running the mild months slightly leaner on purpose - a trade almost every contractor accepts once it is explained in those terms.
Yes, and it is usually the cheapest remaining improvement once the account structure is right. Someone with no cooling and someone pricing a replacement need different pages - one wants a phone number and an answer time, the other wants options, financing and a reason to trust you. Sending both to one page means neither gets what they came for.
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No pitch deck, no discovery call you have to sit through. Tell us the situation and we will tell you whether we can help.