Google Ads for HVAC

What do you need before you turn the ads on?

HVAC has two problems at once. The clicks are expensive, and the demand arrives in bursts, so a heat wave hands you a fortnight of searches in three days. An account that is not ready burns real money in the week it can least afford to. Most of the fix is not an advertising job. It is a phone and a service area job.

• Somebody who picks up. On the first ninety degree day the homeowner calls four companies and books whoever answers, so voicemail is a lost job you paid for. Decide who covers 5pm to 8am before you set a bid.
• An honest service area. Not the area you would like to cover, the area you will send a van to at 9pm in August. Every mile past that buys calls you will turn down while your own towns are still ringing.
• Ad scheduling that matches who is answering. If nobody takes calls after seven, do not run no heat ads at two in the morning. If you do take night calls, bid harder then, not less, because almost nobody else is bidding.
• Call tracking that counts real calls. Google optimizes toward whatever outcome you hand it. Give it nothing and it chases cheap clicks, and the cheapest clicks in HVAC are homeowners resetting their own thermostat. Count calls over sixty seconds and completed forms, not clicks to the contact page.
• A page that names the service and the city. Sending an expensive click to a homepage with a form at the bottom throws away a third of what you spend. The page wants a phone number at the top, the service they searched for, your towns, your license number and your financing options.

That list is yours, and nobody can do it for you. The Google Ads half is the part myAgency does.

How do you set up an HVAC campaign?

Five ad groups, split by how urgent the job is and what it pays. Keeping them apart is how you stop a run of eighty nine dollar tune-ups hiding the replacement work that pays the year.

The settings that matter, and the ones that do not

Google's defaults are set up for Google. Five are worth changing on day one, and the last is specific to this trade.

• Turn off Search Partners and the Display Network. A new Search campaign opts you into both, and for a local HVAC company they spend real money on placements that never produce a call.
• Target people in your area, not people interested in it. The default includes anyone showing interest in your towns, such as somebody researching contractors in a city they retire to next year. Change it to presence only. One dropdown, and the highest value change on this list.
• Set the ad schedule to your answering hours. Covered above, and it belongs in the settings pass too.
• Pick a bidding strategy with something to aim at. Maximize clicks buys the cheapest traffic available, and in HVAC the cheapest traffic is DIY. Once call conversions record properly, move to a conversion based strategy.
• Put cooling and heating in separate campaigns, not just separate ad groups. Budget is a campaign setting, and you will move money between the two of them four times a year. Do it on day one and the seasonal work below is two number changes instead of a rebuild.

Not worth your time: bid adjustments by device, time of day, weather or demographic. Once Smart Bidding is running it accounts for all of that on every auction and your adjustments are ignored.

Which HVAC keywords actually make the phone ring?

A short list where every keyword describes a job you want, in the words a homeowner uses. Not two hundred variations, which is how an HVAC Google Ads account ends up with a hundred and eighty keywords that never produced a call.

Two rules keep the list honest. Every keyword names a job you would send a van to, and every keyword is what a homeowner would type rather than a technician. Nobody searches for a failed run capacitor. They search for why the air is warm.

Brand terms are worth a line of their own. Homeowners search carrier dealer near me and trane repair, and if you are an authorized dealer those are cheap, high intent clicks most competitors never bid on. If you are not, leave them alone.

A word on match types

Add keywords as phrase match, not broad. Broad lets Google show you against anything it decides is related, which here includes appliance repair, refrigeration and people looking for an apprenticeship. It earns its place a month or two in, once you have a working negative list and real conversion history. Start tight and open up, because opening up is cheap and closing back down costs whatever you spent finding out.

What wastes HVAC ad budget?

This is where an HVAC account leaks, and it leaks quietly. Six groups of negatives, added at campaign level so they apply everywhere. Build them before you turn the ads on, not after you have paid to discover them.

The mistake almost everyone makes with HVAC negatives

Blocking the money words. Somebody searching AC replacement cost is not window shopping, they are deciding whether to call you or the company down the road, and that search carries the largest ticket in your account. Same for price, quote and financing. Block the intent to fix it themselves, not the intent to spend.

The second is blocking a word without checking what else it appears in. Negate unit to keep out window units and you lose outdoor unit not running, a real job. Negate thermostat to stop the reset searches and you switch off thermostat installation. Negate free and you lose free estimate, which is a phrase your best customers type. Add the phrase, not the word, whenever the word does more than one thing.

The third is rebates and tax credits. Those searches mix people doing paperwork with people about to buy a heat pump, and which mix you get depends on your state. Watch that one in the search terms report for a month before you decide, rather than blocking it on day one.

Then keep going. A list built once is out of date within a month, and it goes stale fastest at the change of season. Somebody has to read the search terms report every week or two and add what turned up. It is the most reliable predictor of whether an HVAC account works, and the first thing that stops when the phones get busy.

How do you handle the season swing?

No other trade's demand moves like this. Cooling searches multiply on the first hot week and collapse in October, heating does the reverse, and a campaign built in June is wrong by November unless somebody changes it. This is the part of Google Ads for HVAC that no generic guide covers, and it is worth more than any bid tweak.

Start from the structure above. Cooling and heating live in separate campaigns because budget is set at campaign level, so moving money between seasons is two numbers rather than a rebuild. Replacement can sit in its own campaign too, since it runs all year and should not be starved by whichever season is loud.

• Do not switch the off-season campaign off. Pausing for four months throws away what Smart Bidding learned, so you start the next season cold, at the moment clicks are most expensive. Drop the budget to a floor and leave it running instead.
• Expect the first hot week and the first cold snap to spend double. Google is allowed to spend up to twice your daily budget on a high demand day and settle it back over the month. Those two weeks are the highest value of your year, so the mistake is not the overspend, it is being budget capped through them.
• Buy replacement and maintenance in the shoulder seasons. Spring and autumn clicks cost less, and somebody searching about a new system in March is planning rather than panicking, which is a better conversation and a better close.
• Move the budget four times a year, not once. Early spring into cooling, late summer back out, early autumn into heating, late winter back out. Fifteen minutes each time, and it is the single highest return maintenance task on the account.
• Re-read the search terms after each switch. The waste changes with the season. Window unit searches arrive in June and space heater searches in November, and neither is in a negative list written in the other half of the year.

The classic seasonal failure is leaving AC repair keywords running at the July bid in January. Nobody chose that. Somebody got busy, and the account carried on buying the wrong season for four months.

What does HVAC PPC cost?

PPC for HVAC companies has two separate costs, and they get confused constantly. What you pay Google for clicks, and what you pay somebody to manage it.

The click

There is no published benchmark for HVAC on its own. The closest real number is Home and Home Improvement in WordStream's 2026 Google Ads benchmarks, which puts the category at an average $8.33 per click and $90.92 per lead, at a 6.47% click-through rate and an 8.05% conversion rate, drawn from 13,474 US search campaigns running between April 2025 and March 2026.

Source: WordStream, 2026 Google Ads Benchmarks. That category also contains plumbing, roofing and remodelling, so read it as a range check rather than an HVAC figure.

Treat it as the middle of a wide spread. Emergency terms in a competitive metro during a heat wave run well above it, and tune-up terms run below it all year. Your own market matters more than any national average, and Google's Keyword Planner shows the top of page bid range for your keywords in your towns for free.

The click price is not what decides this anyway. What a booked job is worth to you is. At an eighty nine dollar tune-up a ninety dollar lead is a loss you are paying to take. At a nine thousand dollar replacement it is cheap, which is the whole reason the campaign is split by ticket.

The management

Then there is the cost of somebody doing the work on this page. HVAC PPC services are sold two ways, a flat monthly retainer or a percentage of ad spend, usually with a minimum and frequently on a contract. What you buy is somebody reading the search terms report, adding negatives, moving bids, rebalancing the seasons and pausing keywords that stopped producing. It is real work and it matters. It also runs to a consistent set of rules, which is why software can now do it at a fixed price, and why HVAC PPC management no longer has to mean a retainer.

There is the cost of a click, and there is the cost of somebody managing it. The second one you can change. An agency retainer runs around $1,500 a month, and myAgency is $150 a month with no contract.

How much should you budget, and how far should you drive?

The two questions every HVAC owner asks first share an answer: buy enough clicks in a small enough area to learn something.

Work backwards from the click. If clicks run eight to fifteen dollars in season and one in ten to one in fifteen turns into a call, a booked job costs somewhere near a hundred and fifty dollars in ad spend. A budget buying three or four clicks a day gives you a lead every few days, which is too little to tell a good week from a bad one.

For most one to five truck residential HVAC companies that means seventy five to a hundred and fifty dollars a day in season on the emergency and repair groups only, adding the rest once those two produce, and a fraction of that off season. Small and wide is the common mistake. Small and narrow beats it, because a budget spread across five ad groups and forty miles never gathers enough data anywhere to improve.

How far to advertise

Set the radius by what the job pays, not by how far you would go in principle.

• No cool and no heat: tight. Fifteen to twenty miles, or half an hour of driving. The value of an emergency call is being able to get there, and a customer waiting three hours in a hot house has phoned somebody else.
• Repair and maintenance: your normal service area. Scheduled work, so drive time is a cost rather than a dealbreaker.
• Replacement and installs: wider. A nine thousand dollar system justifies an hour in the truck, and this is the one group where the next county pays for itself.

Use separate campaigns rather than one at the widest radius. A single radius set to the biggest job you might take means paying emergency prices for no heat calls forty miles out that you will decline.

What should the ad and the landing page say?

The ad has one job: repeat what they searched for and tell them when you can be there. Most HVAC ads fail on the second half.

Put the service and the town in the headline, because somebody searching AC repair in Mesa should see AC repair and Mesa. Then say when, specifically. Same day beats fast, and two hour response beats same day. If you answer at night, say so, because 24/7 is the most clicked thing an HVAC ad can carry in a heat wave and most competitors do not offer it.

Then the things that make somebody dial instead of going back to the results: license number, years in business, the brands you are authorized to service, whether the estimate is free, and financing on replacement. On a five figure system, financing moves more people than every adjective put together. Skip best HVAC company and quality service, because every competing ad says it, and never promise a price you have not committed to.

The page has to hold up its end. Phone number at the top, tappable, big enough to hit one handed in a hot house. The service they searched for in the first line. Your towns written out. Reviews visible without scrolling twice. Financing and a rough range on the replacement pages, because that searcher came looking for a number. A short form for the people who will not phone, which in the maintenance group is more of them than you would think. Send every ad group to the same homepage and you are paying for the click, then asking the customer to go and find what they came for.

What does month one actually look like?

Knowing the shape of the first month stops you switching the whole thing off in week two, which is when most HVAC owners switch it off.

Read the weather as well as the report. An account launched in a mild fortnight looks worse than it is and one launched in a heat wave looks better, so judge month one against the same season rather than the month before it. And whatever else stops, do not stop reading the search terms report. Not the dashboard, the actual list of what people typed. It separates an account that improves every week from one that spends the same money forever.

That is a useful hour every week, and somebody has to spend it. If you would rather it was not you, myAgency spends it for you and tells you what changed.

What does Google Ads management for HVAC cost?

Everything above is genuinely how to do it properly. It is also an evening of setup, an hour every week forever and four seasonal rebalances a year, and you are on a roof in July.

That is what we built myAgency for. You connect your Google Ads account and it creates the campaign for you: the ad groups, the keywords, the negative list, the radius, the ads. Creating it, optimizing it and managing it all takes under five minutes. After that it runs on its own, twice a day. It reads the search terms you would have read on a Sunday night, blocks the homeowner resetting their own thermostat and the apprentice looking for a job, tunes the keywords producing calls, pauses the ones that stopped, and writes every change down in plain English.

No agency. HVAC lead generation has meant either a monthly retainer for somebody to log into your account a couple of times, usually on a contract, or a shared lead service selling the same call to three of your competitors, and you can compare the retainer side by side. myAgency is $150 a month, no contract, no setup fee.

And no dashboard to learn. Google Ads has hundreds of settings and no instructions, which is the real reason most HVAC companies either overpay an HVAC marketing agency or leave a half-built campaign running at ten dollars a click through both seasons. You do not need to learn any of it. You need the phone to ring on the first hot day.

Your HVAC campaign, built in five minutes

Connect your Google Ads account and myAgency creates, optimizes and manages the whole thing for you. Then you go back to the job.

Build my HVAC campaign

$150 a month, and after that you only open Google Ads if you want to. Already running ads? start with what your account is doing now.

Other trades we cover

The same guide, written for a different job. Each one covers the campaign structure, the keywords, the negative list and what month one looks like for that trade. The full set is on the industries hub.

• Google Ads for dentists. Some of the most expensive clicks in local search, and a lot of the traffic that looks dental is job hunters, students and home remedies.
• Google Ads for plumbers. Emergency work and DIY research share almost the same words, so a lot of the budget goes to people who are about to fix it themselves.
• Google Ads for roofers. Storm season pulls in out-of-area crews who bid the market up for a few weeks, and a lot of roofing traffic is homeowners pricing a job they are not ready to book.
• Google Ads for pest control. The season decides the search, so the calendar runs the campaign. A recurring contract and a one-time callout look identical in the keyword list.
• Google Ads for junk removal. The word junk covers six unrelated jobs, and this is the one trade where the cost of doing the work changes with the search term, so a cheap lead can still lose money.
• Google Ads for electricians. Apprenticeship and licensing searches are heavier here than in any other trade, and panel, EV and generator work closes weeks after the click.
• Google Ads for mobile detailing. Most detailing searches are people learning to detail their own car, or heading for a cheap drive-through wash.