Let's TalkLet's TalkEmergency calls, seasonal swings and a replacement sale worth thirty maintenance visits - three different businesses sharing one phone number.
Send us access to your ad account and your booking data. We will come back with where the spend is going, which campaigns produce booked jobs rather than calls that go nowhere, and what the emergency and replacement segments are really costing you. Delivered as a recorded walkthrough, no call required to receive it.
Four failures we see repeatedly in this vertical, and what each one actually costs.
A homeowner with no cooling at 2pm in August and a homeowner comparing quotes for a system replacement are the same household in different states of mind. One will call whoever answers, the other will take two weeks and three quotes. Running them through one campaign, one landing page and one offer means the urgent buyer meets a page about financing options and the considered buyer meets a page shouting about same-day service.
HVAC demand spikes with the first real heat and the first real cold, and collapses in the shoulder seasons. A flat monthly budget systematically underbids in the two weeks that decide the quarter and overspends in April. Worse, most accounts hit their daily cap by mid-morning on the hottest days - the exact hours when the highest-intent calls are happening.
The agency reports calls. The office knows how many of those calls were wrong numbers, existing customers, sales calls or people outside the service area. Nobody joins the two up, so budget keeps flowing to the campaigns producing the most calls rather than the most work. In this trade the gap between those two lists is usually large enough to change which channels look viable.
Most HVAC marketing spend converts on a phone call, and most HVAC businesses have never reviewed what happens on those calls. Missed calls at peak, no after-hours answer, a technician taking bookings between jobs. You can double the ad budget and change nothing if half the calls at 4pm on the busiest day of the year go to voicemail.
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.
Call tracking, form tracking and the reconciliation back to your booking system are part of the engagement rather than something we ask your office to maintain. Most agencies report what the ad platform tells them, because that is the number they can produce without touching your operations. It is also the number that stays high while the work does not arrive.
In this trade the cheapest available improvement is frequently call handling rather than media, and an agency paid to run media has an obvious reason not to say so. We would rather have that conversation in the audit and keep the account for three years than sell you more clicks into a process that drops them.
We plan the year around the two windows that decide it and hold budget back for them deliberately, rather than discovering in July that the annual spend is two thirds gone. That means quieter months look quiet in the reporting, which is a harder conversation than a flat line and the right way to run the account.
Where the spend goes, which search terms produce booked work, and what happens on the calls those ads generate. The second half is the part usually skipped.
Emergency, replacement and maintenance get their own campaigns, their own pages and their own definitions of a good lead. They stop averaging each other out.
Call tracking, conversion tracking and the link back to booked jobs. Scaling a campaign you cannot measure to the calendar just multiplies the uncertainty.
Phone-first, fast, with the service area and the answer time visible. A homeowner with no air conditioning does not read a hero paragraph.
Budget shaped against the demand curve, with headroom reserved for the peak weeks and bid strategy that does not cap out at lunchtime on the days that matter.
Spend follows the campaigns producing work, which is a different ranking from the campaigns producing calls. That reordering is usually the first month's biggest gain.
The parts of this that come from having run it in this industry before rather than from running it well in general.
Every HVAC business has fringe territory it will serve reluctantly and territory it will not serve at all, and most targeting is a radius that ignores both. We set targeting by drive time and price the edges separately, so a job ninety minutes away is bid for as the lower-margin job it is rather than at the same cost as one down the road.
A maintenance agreement is the closest thing this trade has to recurring revenue and it changes the economics of every other campaign, because a plan holder is the person who calls you rather than searching when the system fails. Marketing that ignores plan enrolment is optimising acquisition while leaking the customers already won.
The first sustained heat and the first hard freeze move demand more than any creative decision will, and they are forecastable days in advance. Budget and bids that respond to that are unremarkable once set up and rare in practice - most accounts run the same daily cap through a heatwave as through a mild week in March.
A system replacement is a four- or five-figure unplanned purchase, and the decision is frequently gated on whether it can be paid for monthly rather than on which contractor is best. A replacement funnel that leaves financing to the in-home conversation loses quotes it never learns about.
The closest engagement we can show you is a multi-location service business, not an HVAC contractor, and we are not going to present it as one. What makes it the right comparison is the shape of the problem: many locations, demand that arrives by phone, and a gap between leads reported and appointments actually attended. Cost per lead fell to $19 and show-rate rose 44% across the network - and the show-rate half came from work on what happened after the click, which is the same half most HVAC accounts have never looked at.
Read the full case studyLess than the seasonal peaks need and more than the shoulder months deserve, which is why a flat monthly figure is the wrong frame. The number that governs it is what a booked job is worth to you - a replacement sale and a service call have completely different economics, and a budget set against a blended average underfunds the one that pays. We would rather set the target from your job values and let the monthly spend move than agree a flat retainer number that is wrong eleven months of the year.
They are different tools and most contractors should run both where LSAs are available. LSAs charge per lead and carry the Google Guaranteed badge, which converts well for emergency and service work. Search ads give you control over the message, which matters far more for replacement sales where you are competing on trust and financing rather than on answering first. Running only LSAs usually means the higher-value half of the business is unmarketed.
Usually some combination of broad match reaching people outside your service area, ads running for parts or DIY queries, and no negative keyword work since the account was built. It is also frequently existing customers calling a tracked number, which inflates the lead count and tells you nothing. The fix starts with listening to the calls rather than looking at the report - which is the first thing the audit does.
At a reduced level, and aimed at different work. The shoulder months are when maintenance plan enrolment and pre-season tune-ups are sellable, and they are when replacement research happens without the pressure of a failed system. Going dark entirely means rebuilding momentum every spring and surrendering the cheapest months for capturing people who will buy later.
Call tracking with recordings on every campaign, then reconciliation against your booking system - either by export or by integration, depending on what you run. It is deliberate work rather than a switch, and it is the difference between reporting that says you got 200 calls and reporting that says which campaigns produced the 40 jobs. We do not consider an account properly set up until that link exists.
Both, but the honest answer is that the work is different. A single-truck business usually gets more from local visibility, reviews and call handling than from a large paid budget, and we will say so rather than selling media that outpaces the capacity to deliver the jobs. Multi-truck and multi-location businesses are where the campaign structure above earns its keep.
This is one part of a bigger service. Here is the whole of it, and the closest neighbours.
No pitch deck, no discovery call you have to sit through. Tell us the situation and we will tell you whether we can help.