HVAC Company: 310% More Leads from Same Google Ads Budget

The situation

A residential HVAC company in downstate Illinois with a two-technician operation was spending $1,034/month on Google Ads through a nationally franchised marketing service. Their reporting showed decent impression numbers and click-through rates, but the owner was generating only 11 phone calls per month from the ads — far too few to keep their schedule full during shoulder season.

The core problem: the franchised marketing service was optimizing for clicks and impressions, not phone calls. The campaign looked good on vanity metrics but was failing at the only metric that matters for a service business: booked jobs.

What we found

Analyzing the search term report from the previous 6 months revealed that 71% of clicks came from searches with no service intent. "HVAC certification programs," "HVAC school near me," "how does an air conditioner work," "HVAC technician salary," and "Carrier parts distributor" were all present in the report. Every click on those terms was a guaranteed waste — none of those searchers want a residential HVAC service call. Despite these obvious indicators, no negative keywords existed in the account to block them.

The ads themselves were also generic — the same "Fast, Reliable HVAC Service" headlines used by every HVAC company running Google Ads in every market in the country. No differentiation, no urgency, no local specificity.

What we changed

Negative keywords first: we added 244 negative keywords blocking every non-buyer search pattern visible in the 6-month search term report. This single change eliminated 71% of wasted clicks immediately. Match types second: we converted the remaining keywords from broad match to phrase match, then built specific exact match campaigns for the highest-intent commercial keywords: "HVAC repair [city]," "AC not working," "furnace repair emergency," "air conditioning installation quote." Creative third: we wrote ads that led with same-day availability, a 100-point inspection with every service call, and a price-match guarantee — differentiators that give a two-technician shop an advantage over larger national chains that cannot make those promises credibly. Finally, we added call tracking through Google Ads call extensions and set up calls over 60 seconds as the primary conversion event — so the algorithm optimized for actual service conversations, not page views.

Results

Leads per month increased from 11 to 43 on exactly the same monthly budget. Cost per lead dropped from $94 to $24. Over the subsequent summer peak season, the owner hired a third technician to handle the increased call volume — their first hire in four years. The business scaled from a $340K annual run rate to a $680K run rate within 14 months of the campaign restructure.