Google Ads for HVAC companies: budgets, campaigns and the ones that waste money

By Steve Meitler · 2026-07-16 · 5 min read

Realistic cost per lead for repair and replacement, Local Services Ads first, heat wave bidding, financing in the ad copy, and the campaigns to shut off.

Google Ads is the fastest way for an HVAC company to buy demand and the fastest way to burn $6,000 with nothing to show. The difference is almost never the bidding software. It is whether you separated repair from replacement, whether you matched your ad schedule to who answers the phone, and whether you sent traffic to a page that mentions the system a homeowner is standing next to.

Start with the economics, because they decide everything else.

Repair leads and replacement leads are two different businesses

A no-cooling call is worth $350 to $600 on average and closes at 80% or higher, because the homeowner already decided to buy when they searched. A system replacement lead is worth $8,000 to $14,000 and closes at 25% to 40% after an in-home appointment.

That means you can afford radically different lead costs:

• Repair lead: $45 to $130 in most metros. At a $475 average repair ticket and an 80% close, $130 still leaves room.
• Replacement lead: $120 to $350. At a $10,500 average install, 35% gross margin and a 30% close, $350 buys $1,100 of gross profit.

Run them in the same campaign and Google will optimize toward the cheap repair clicks, because they convert more often. Your replacement pipeline quietly dies while your cost per lead report looks great. Split them into separate campaigns with separate budgets on day one.

Local Services Ads before search ads

For most residential HVAC contractors, Local Services Ads are the better first dollar. They sit above the text ads, charge per lead rather than per click, and require license and insurance verification plus background checks on the owner. Repair leads commonly land between $35 and $90.

Three things drive LSA placement: proximity, review count and rating, and responsiveness. That last one is measured. Ignore an LSA lead for four hours and your placement drops. Contractors with fewer than 20 reviews generally cannot spend their LSA budget at all, which is why the reviews guide is a prerequisite, not a side project. Across 46,610 listings the median contractor has 30 reviews, so most of the trade is under-fueling LSAs without knowing it.

Dispute the junk leads. Wrong service, out of area, spam call. Google credits most legitimate disputes if you file within 30 days, and contractors who never dispute pay 10% to 15% more than they should.

The campaign structure that works

Four campaigns, no more, for a residential contractor spending $3,000 to $15,000 a month:

1. Emergency repair, exact and phrase match. Keywords: "ac not cooling", "emergency ac repair", "furnace not working", "no heat", "hvac repair [city]". Manual or maximize-conversions bidding, calls as the conversion. Schedule it to hours when a human answers.
2. Replacement. Keywords: "ac replacement cost", "new hvac system", "furnace replacement", "heat pump installation [city]". Longer consideration, so run form and call conversions, and expect a 3 to 10 day lag between click and booked appointment.
3. Branded. Your own company name. Cheap, high converting, and it defends against the aggregator sites that bid on your name. Cap it at $10 a day.
4. Maintenance agreements, seasonal only. Six weeks in spring and six in fall. Low volume, cheap clicks, and it fills the shoulder season. Details in the seasonality guide.

Skip Display. Skip broad match on "hvac". Be extremely careful with Performance Max until the other campaigns have data to feed it, because PMax will happily spend your budget on the cheapest possible clicks and report them as conversions.

Heat wave bidding

The week a heat dome parks over your county, every contractor in the market raises bids at once. Cost per click can double for five days. Two responses, both defensible:

Raise the budget and ride it. Demand is inelastic during a heat wave and a homeowner will pay for same-day service, so a $220 repair lead can still be profitable. Do this only if you have the truck capacity to run the calls. Buying leads you cannot service inside 24 hours produces the worst reviews of your year.

Or cap it and shift to replacement. During a heat wave, the homeowner whose 19-year-old unit just failed is the most receptive replacement buyer you will meet all year. Pull budget from repair, push it to replacement, and let the repair calls come from LSAs and your existing customer base.

Set this up before the forecast, not during it. Write a heat-wave budget rule into the account and a slow-season one, and check the seven-day forecast every Monday from June through August.

Financing in the ad copy

Financing changes ad performance in both directions and belongs in one place only.

In replacement ads, a line like "0% for 18 months on qualifying systems" raises click-through meaningfully and raises lead volume. It also lowers average credit quality, so expect more declines. Worth it if your finance partner approves 55% or better.

Never put financing in emergency repair ads. Someone with no cooling is not financing a $400 capacitor, and the message dilutes urgency. Repair ads should say the things that matter at 3 p.m. in August: same-day service, hours, a real phone number, and your review count.

Use ad assets properly. Sitelinks to the repair page, replacement page, maintenance page and financing page. Callout assets for licensed and insured, weekend service, brands carried. A call asset that routes to a tracked number so you can hear what you are buying.

Where the money leaks

• Broad match everything. "HVAC" broad match matches "hvac technician jobs" and "hvac school." You will pay for both.
• Running ads when nobody answers. If the office closes at 5 and calls roll to voicemail, stop the search ads at 5. Or hire the after-hours coverage; the missed calls guide prices both.
• Landing on the homepage. A "furnace replacement" click that lands on a homepage with a slider converts at roughly half the rate of one landing on a furnace replacement page.
• No negative keyword list. Add: jobs, career, salary, training, school, parts, DIY, wholesale, rental, apartment, warranty transfer.
• No call tracking. Without recording you cannot tell whether the ads are producing bad leads or your CSR is losing good ones.

What to spend

A one to three truck residential shop should start at $2,500 to $4,000 a month across LSAs and search, weighted 60% to LSAs. Five to ten trucks: $8,000 to $20,000, with replacement taking the larger share. Below $1,500 a month you will not gather enough data to optimize anything, and you are better off putting that money into reviews and the website first. Ask your distributor about co-op reimbursement before you set the budget, since most manufacturer programs rebate half of qualifying spend and change the math entirely.

Frequently asked

How long before I can judge it? Sixty days for repair, ninety for replacement. Replacement leads take days to become booked appointments and weeks to become signed jobs, so a 30-day verdict on a replacement campaign is guessing.

Should I let Google's rep manage the account? The rep is measured on your spend, not your profit. Take their audit, ignore the recommendations to enable broad match and PMax, and decide yourself.

Do I need a separate account per location? No. One account, separate campaigns with geographic targeting, so the learning data pools.

If you want the account rebuilt and run, Google Ads management is one of the services in the free 14-day trial. Text or call (385) 832-6175.