Google Ads for HVAC contractors

How customers in this market actually search

There are really two HVAC businesses inside every HVAC company, and Google Ads treats them very differently. Repair demand is urgent, price-sensitive and enormous in volume: a searcher whose AC died on a 98-degree afternoon will contact three companies in ten minutes. Replacement and install demand is slower, worth ten times as much per job, and involves financing questions, brand comparisons and often a spouse.

Most accounts we review are built for repair and accidentally starving install. Repair keywords are cheaper, so they soak up the shared budget, and the $9,000 system replacements quietly never get their impressions. Splitting them means you can knowingly lose a few repair clicks in July in order to keep showing for ‘new AC unit cost’ the whole month.

The campaigns worth separating

These are the splits that usually matter in HVAC. Each one deserves its own budget, because a shared budget always drifts toward whatever converts most cheaply — which is rarely what pays you best.

• AC repair and emergency cooling, budget-capped by day
• Furnace and heating repair, mirrored for the winter half of the year
• System replacement and new installs — the highest-value campaign you will run
• Heat pump and high-efficiency upgrades, often driven by rebates and tax credits
• Maintenance plans and tune-ups, which are cheap leads and excellent lifetime value
• Indoor air quality, ductwork and mini-splits as their own ad groups

Negative keywords from day one

Every HVAC account we build launches with a negative list, and it grows every week from the search terms report. A starting point for this trade:

This is a fraction of a real list. Mature accounts in this category typically carry several hundred negatives, most of them discovered from actual search terms rather than guessed in advance.

Timing and seasonality

The first genuinely hot week and the first genuinely cold week of the year are the two most profitable moments in an HVAC account, and both are visible days in advance. We watch the forecast in your metro and move budget before the spike rather than after it, because bid strategies react to yesterday’s data and the weather does not wait. Off-season, the same budget goes into maintenance plans and replacement research rather than sitting idle.

What counts as a conversion here

Repair and replacement should never be counted as the same conversion. A tune-up enquiry and a full system quote have wildly different values, and if Google sees them as identical it will optimise toward whichever is easier to produce — always the cheap one. We give them separate conversion actions with separate values, and where your CRM allows it, we import closed-job revenue so the account learns which campaigns produce installs, not just calls.

What the landing page needs

Paid traffic in this category should not land on a homepage. The page that receives the click needs, at minimum:

• Financing and monthly payment options visible immediately on install pages
• Current rebates and tax credits, which move the decision more than brand does
• Separate repair and replacement pages — never one ‘HVAC services’ page
• Same-day availability stated for repair, quote turnaround stated for install
• Brand logos you are certified to install, which buyers do search by name

We build these when the existing site cannot carry the traffic — it is the one design service we offer, precisely because the campaign depends on it.

The mistakes we see most often in HVAC accounts

• One budget shared between repair and install, which always ends with install losing
• Leaving the account on a fixed monthly budget through a heat wave
• Bidding on competitor brand names without a landing page that gives a reason to switch
• Ignoring maintenance-plan keywords because the immediate ticket is small