Generic ad agencies manage HVAC accounts the way a general practitioner does heart surgery — technically qualified, statistically inadvisable. They bid the same in April as in July. They send emergency-repair clicks and $15,000-replacement clicks to the same page. They report clicks and impressions, which is like reporting how many people drove past your shop. This trade has seasons, emergencies, ticket sizes that span two orders of magnitude, and a bidding war every heat wave. The ads should know all of that.
Campaigns built the way the trade works
- Emergency AC and no-heat campaigns — aggressive after-hours bidding when desperation is highest and competitors’ budgets are asleep
- AC repair vs. AC replacement split cleanly — different intent, different economics, different landing pages
- Financing-led replacement campaigns for the payment-minded searcher
- Furnace, heat pump, and tune-up campaigns that breathe with the calendar
- Commercial HVAC campaigns aimed at property managers, not homeowners
- Local Services Ads managed alongside — reviews fed, responsiveness tuned, disputes filed on junk leads
- Dedicated landing pages included, because ads without matched pages are half a machine
“The click is a cost. The booked job is the product. Never let an agency report the first as if it were the second.”
Everything is tracked through to the schedule board: call tracking numbers per campaign, form attribution, LSA lead records reconciled weekly. The monthly report reads like a job costing sheet — spend, leads, booked jobs, cost per booked job, by campaign — because that is the arithmetic you actually run a shop on. When a campaign cannot justify its keep in those terms, it gets fixed or shot. Ad budgets are for buying jobs, not for decorating charts.
And because the landing pages, the tracking, and the website all come from the same bench, there is no seam where three vendors point at each other. The ad, the page, and the phone all agree — which, in this business, is most of what “optimization” ever meant.