How HVAC Google Ads should be managed - campaign split by intent, LSA integration, seasonal budgets, call tracking and cost per booked job. This guide is written for HVAC contractors outsourcing paid search, and everything below comes from work we do on live accounts rather than recycled theory. Skim the sections, take the numbers as starting benchmarks for your own market, and treat the checklist items as a work plan you can hand to your team or your agency this week.
What it costs
HVAC CPCs commonly run $8-$35, spiking during heat waves. Practical media budgets are $3,000-$20,000 per month seasonally weighted, with management at 10-20% or $700-$2,500 flat. Cost per booked job typically lands $80-$300.
Treat every range above as a starting benchmark, not a quote. Competition in your specific market, the current state of your website, how much production capacity you already have in-house, and how aggressive your growth target is will all move the number. The useful exercise is to work backwards from revenue: what is one additional customer worth, how many do you need per month to justify the spend, and does the plan on the table plausibly produce them?
How long it takes
Calls start within 48 hours of launch. Allow four to six weeks for stable cost-per-job data. Rebuild budget plans quarterly around seasonal demand rather than holding one annual figure.
Two things reliably compress timelines. The first is production volume: more genuinely useful pages and more consistent execution per month means faster results, which is why budget and speed are linked. The second is starting condition - a site with clean technical foundations and existing authority moves much faster than a new domain. Be honest about which one you are, then set expectations accordingly with whoever signs off on the budget.
What actually works
Split emergency repair, maintenance plans and system replacement into separate campaigns with distinct budgets, bids and landing pages.
Run Local Services Ads alongside Search and track them separately - LSAs often deliver the lowest cost per call while Search covers the terms LSAs miss.
None of these are clever. They are the boring fundamentals executed at unusual quality and consistency, which is what separates programmes that compound from programmes that plateau after one quarter.
Wire call tracking with call-answered and job-booked as conversion events, and import booked jobs offline so bidding optimises to revenue.
Flex budgets with weather and capacity: scale up in demand spikes, pause replacement campaigns when the schedule is already full.
Mistakes that cost the most
Optimising to phone calls rather than booked jobs, which rewards volume over quality.
Running a flat monthly budget through a sharply seasonal business.
Sending emergency traffic to a homepage instead of a fast click-to-call page.
Every one of these is common enough that we expect to find at least two of them in any audit. Fixing them costs almost nothing compared with the spend they waste, so they belong at the top of the work plan rather than in a backlog.
Your next 90 days
Weeks 1-2: instrument everything first. Tracking, call tracking where relevant, a conversion definition that finance would accept, and a baseline you can defend later. Skipping this step is the single most expensive shortcut available, because without a baseline you cannot prove anything worked.
Weeks 3-8: ship the highest-leverage items from the 'what actually works' list above, in priority order, one at a time so each change stays attributable. Resist the urge to rebuild everything at once - it feels productive and it destroys your ability to learn.
Weeks 9-12: build the compounding layer - content cadence, review velocity, link acquisition, experimentation - and set a monthly review with a fixed agenda. HVAC accounts that import booked jobs as offline conversions consistently outperform accounts optimising to raw call counts on cost per booked job.
If you would like a second opinion before you commit budget, we run free 30-minute strategy calls and will walk through your current setup using the same diagnostic we use with paying clients.
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