HVAC PPC: 11 Tips to Get More Qualified Leads for Your HVAC Business

New leads are the lifeblood of any business and unless you’re generating high-quality leads consistently, your HVAC business is likely treading water or even stepping backwards.

Pay-per-click advertising (PPC) remains one of the best ways to grow your business. But so few HVAC companies seem to get it right. 

HVAC PPC takes know-how, patience and investment. The rewards can be huge but many business owners don’t know where to start, fail to allocate a sufficient budget, try to manage campaigns themselves and/or don’t give it enough time. Many have no idea how profitable their PPC campaigns are and often track the wrong metrics.

New business and revenue matter more than simple clicks. And to get results, you need to find the right balance between ad spend, performance tracking and attending to the new business that comes in.

That’s not easy. But by following the 11 tips from this article, you can find the right balance so that the leads that are currently going to competing HVAC companies start coming your way.

Here’s what we cover:

What is HVAC PPC and How Does It Work?

PPC means pay-per-click. This is a form of digital advertising where advertisers pay a fee only when a user clicks on an ad.

PPC allows HVAC companies to compete for the prime real estate at the top of the first page of Google whenever users enter search terms relevant to their business.

So, if your company specializes in air conditioner repairs and maintenance in Denver, for instance, a well-targeted and well-managed PPC campaign can help your ads for these services appear at the top of the page, like this:

Insert screenshot using the above example – air conditioner repairs and maintenance in Denver

When returning search results, PPC platforms consider user intent, relevance and the location of a business.  

For example, if a user is searching for air conditioner repairs in Toronto, it’s quite likely that the user intends to find and hire an HVAC company that specializes in this service. if your business has bid successfully for relevant search terms, your ad will appear and you have a great chance of a new lead.

Because this is a highly prized location, it can get competitive — and expensive if you don’t know what you’re doing. 

HVAC companies need to place bids for keywords and keyword terms based on the perceived value of a click from a potential customer. Every time an online user clicks on the ad, you pay a fee to the PPC ad platform.

The good news for HVAC business owners is that the  most desirable terms are not as expensive to bid for as for some professions. The most expensive Google Ads keywords are mainly associated with professional services and finance, such as:

Home services keywords are generally down the list, which means that PPC can still represent great value for HVAC businesses.

Google Ads for HVAC Companies

When we talk about PPC for HVAC companies, we’re really focusing on how HVAC companies can appear at the top of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs). 

Google Ads is the dominant platform — so much so that the terms are often used interchangeably — and this should be very little surprise given Google’s dominance over search engine market share: 

Standard Google Ads are marked as “ads”, may contain images as well as other key information and appear at the top (or bottom) of the SERPs. They look like this:

Screenshot showing another HVAC PPC ad at the top of SERP

But there are other types of HVAC PPC ads to consider, including the following:

Why is PPC for HVAC Companies Important?

In Google’s own words:

“…we conservatively estimate that for every $1 a business spends on Google Ads, they receive $8 in profit through Google Search and Ads.”

The potential for a steady flow of targeted, high-quality leads that convert into real business makes PPC essential for HVAC companies to consider.

It’s a well-known observation that 75% of people will never scroll past the first page on a Google search, Google Ads are your opportunity to fast-track a position there: and that’s essentially a license to quickly grow leads. That’s why it’s so important.

Type in a few keywords for your local area and see how Local Service Ads and Google Ads dominate the results.

If you’re not competing for these top spots, you’re handing free rein to your competitors to get them.

PPC can help your HVAC company:

Do You Need PPC if You Have SEO?

If you’ve been trying to increase your online visibility through organic search results using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies, you’ll know how competitive it is for HVAC companies, especially during the hottest and coldest months of the year. 

SEO is very worthwhile but it usually takes 6-12 months to produce tangible results. So, even if you know that the HVAC services you provide are the best around, homes in the local area may not be able to find you until your SEO efforts start paying dividends.

HVAC PPC is the way to generate leads more immediately. It can help you jump to the top of the queue when leads are dished out.

There are multiple benefits of including both PPC and SEO in your HVAC marketing strategies:

Now, how can you ensure you get the results you want from PPC? 

11 PPC Tips for HVAC Companies

To start developing a continual flow of leads from homeowners and businesses needing your HVAC services, follow these tips:

1. Know Your Numbers!

The purpose of PPC is to generate new business at a profit right? Well it is crucially important to know your businesses KPI’s (key performance indicators) before throwing your money at PPC. Otherwise, how will you know what is the right amount to spend per month?

The key numbers you should know before beginning is:

We will share how you can take these numbers and determine profitability throughout this article.

2. Set the Right Expectations

PPC can generate leads quicker than SEO but you also need to set the right expectations and be patient. 

Leads won’t usually come without a significant investment of time, effort and money over an extended period to set up your PPC campaign and to keep it performing. PPC is not “set and forget” and campaigns need regular monitoring to avoid blowing budgets. If you decide to go it alone, you’ll need to dedicate time weekly (at a minimum) to improve performance.

It’s best to set your PPC goals using the SMART formula:

For a PPC campaign, this might be something like this:

“I aim to generate 30 more leads per month and  I typically convert 33% of those leads. (sold rate) That’s 10 more clients per month. It will take three months and $X,000 investment to achieve this.

3. Familiarize Yourself With the Key PPC Terms

We’ve already mentioned a few important metrics when it comes to PPC. It’s important to understand what these are. 

After you’ve organized your budget and set the wheels in motion for your HVAC PPC marketing campaign to begin, you’ll need to measure its success. Get familiar with the following key PPC terms from the start:

4. Plan Your Budget

You will need a significant enough budget to target the right keywords (and the right audience). Spreading it too thin can be a mistake.

To work out a starting budget, you’ll need to consider your goals in terms of leads (see the first tip). Here are the most important elements to consider:

Once you know your target cost per lead, you can work out an approximate budget like this:

1. Calculate how many new clients you want per month.
2. If your conversion rate is 20 percent and you want 10 new clients per month, you’ll need 50 new leads.
3. 50 x CPL ($75) = budget of $3,750/month.

You’ll need to be comfortable spending an average cost per lead of $50-75, which is average for HVAC PPC. This equates to an average cost per client acquisition of $250–$375 if you convert 20 percent of the leads you get.

Example

To start an HVAC PPC campaign, we suggest a budget of at least three times the estimated value from the above calculation. That’s because we need to generate significant insights from the data to optimize campaigns — starting with a sizable enough budget helps to generate enough data.

It’s crucial to get your budget right as PPC can seem very expensive very quickly if you don’t have a good understanding of what’s required and how it works.  You need to limit your ad spend but base the limitations on realistic expectations. Don’t expect to convert 90 percent of leads, for instance.

Google and Facebook both give you plenty of tools to accurately forecast a typical ad spend. But if you outsource your HVAC PPC to Siege Digital Marketing, we’ll be happy to talk you through it and look after that side of things for you.

5. Find Relevant Keywords

Now that we’ve got an estimated budget, let’s talk about how to use it: by targeting keywords.

Keywords and keyword phrases are the foundation of PPC campaigns. In-depth keyword research before you start your PPC campaign is an investment into its success and its importance cannot be overstated.

Before any ad copy or landing pages are written, we need to know which keywords to target.

You can do this by using the many keyword research tools available, which include:

These tools can all help you find keyword phrases that:

1. Generate enough volume (i.e., enough people are searching for them).
2. Are not too competitive (i.e., every HVAC company is not chasing them, which will make them very expensive to bid for).
3. Have a manageable cost-per-click.

Following are some examples of the most popular keyword phrases for HVAC companies to target:

Source

Generally speaking, it’s best to find a balance between high-volume, broad keywords (which are more expensive and less targeted but reach a lot of people) and low-volume, more specific keywords that convert better.

It’s generally advisable for HVAC companies to focus on this latter group by targeting longtail keywords. These are keyword phrases that are:

Insert a screenshot with a longtail keyword search for HVAC services, showing the ads that are returned.,

Often, building a campaign around targeting longtail keywords will produce a quicker and better ROI than one targeting just “head” keywords that are expensive to bid for, highly competitive and difficult to rank for. 

Negative keywords

Negative keywords are phrases that you don’t want your HVAC ads to appear for. It’s important to make a list of these so that campaigns are optimized and your ad spend doesn’t get wasted on attracting “leads” that are never going to hire your services.

6. Target Keywords in Your Ad Copy and Landing Pages

Now all the preparation, planning and research have been done, it’s time to start getting creative.

Ad copy is what appears in your ads while landing pages are where people who click your ads end up. Both are equally important and work in tandem to produce results in an HVAC PPC campaign.

Great ad copy without effective landing pages means you’ll get the clicks but they won’t convert into paying customers.

Great landing pages without compelling ad copy mean that there won’t be enough clicks through to your sales pages.

Your ad copy and landing pages are important not only for the user experience, clicks and conversions; they are also important ranking factors that decide whether your ad will show above others. 

Can you insert a screenshot here of a landing page from one of your HVAC clients – preferably one that clearly uses keywords in the headline/H2s.

To ensure your ad makes it to the top of the PPC section on the SERP, you’ll need to improve your Quality Score. This is a measure of how effective and relevant your ad is compared to other advertisers bidding on the same keywords.

You can improve your Quality Score by using keywords in your ad copy. Your ads should be readable first and foremost but including keywords in the headline and body text will help your ad to rank.

Ad and landing page copy should:

A final quick point: don’t click on your ads after they’re published or you’ll pay for every click!

7. Optimize Ads by Using Different Match Types

Google holds its reputation as the leading search engine because it returns highly relevant search results. Its PPC platform depends on it.

In an attempt to maintain a high degree of relevance for search terms, Google uses keywords to match ads with search terms people enter, such as “HVAC repairs near me.”

Its keyword match types govern how closely a search term needs to match the keyword for an ad to appear. Here’s a summary: 

8. Track Conversions Not Clicks

If you take nothing else away from this article, remember this: the success of your PPC campaign is not dependent on clicks but on conversions — and that’s what you need to track to determine your ROI.

Tracking clicks alone is an incomplete measure of success because:

Conversions occur when a prospective customer performs the action asked of them on your landing page: fill in a form, call you or download something, for instance.

All your planning/research, ad copy, landing pages and internal lead-handling system must all work together to create successful campaigns. Well-thought-out campaigns target the right customers, compel these potential customers to contact you and look after them when they do.

If any part of this system breaks down, it will reduce conversions and damage the success of your PPC campaign.

You have a good understanding of PPC metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) from tip three. Of these, the most important ones for HVAC companies to track are:

Cost per click may be useful to know for other reasons but is not a true measure of campaign ROI.

NOTE: if the conversion rates from your landing pages are lower than the standard, you’ll need to optimize your landing pages. 

9. Focus On Your Search Terms Report

The reporting tools for PPC campaigns are extensive and the process can get overwhelming if you’re managing PPC for your HVAC company yourself. 

The one report that you need to put the most emphasis on is the search terms report from Google Ads. This details how your ads performed when triggered by actual searches within the search network.

To view your search terms report, follow these steps:

1. Sign in to your Google Ads account
2. Click Campaigns → Insights and reports →Search terms

I recommend that, of the time you spend with reports, the vast majority is spent on your search terms report, removing low-quality keywords and building out extensive negative keyword lists so that you don’t rank for terms that don’t convert.

You should use a negative phrase match to ensure that the keyword plus/minus anything on the phrase is removed. Then your ad won’t appear for these terms. 

Ultimately, the search terms report is extremely important for the ROI and profitability of your HVAC PPC campaigns.

10. Launch Remarketing Campaigns

Remarketing or “retargeting” is an effective way to follow up with people who have shown interest in your products or services but haven’t hired you or purchased anything.

The technology is available for HVAC companies to specifically target potential customers who have shown buying intent by clicking on an ad or landing page but have not decided to “buy” yet. 

Relevant ads will appear for these users, giving you a second “bite at the cherry” at winning their business. Remarketing in this way can:

11. Start Small and Build

This is a quick point to wrap up on. Because of the potential for HVAC PPC to generate huge rewards — but also to become expensive very quickly — it’s advisable to start small. 

One campaign that targets 1-3 ad groups is sufficient to start with for most HVAC businesses. Maybe you target your most profitable service — ac replacement or ac repairs, for instance — and see how it goes for a couple of weeks.

This first campaign will tell you a lot and you can build from there. PPC campaigns should never “sleep” — they can always be tweaked and improved to generate better results.

Once you have a winning formula and the leads are coming in, you can increase your budget and go into overdrive — just make sure that you have the resources to handle the volume of new business that comes your way.

How Much Should I Spend On PPC?

“For PPC, we find it best to reverse engineer your needs to determine how much you need to spend to achieve your goals.

The formula looks like this:

Local Service Ads vs Google Ads

Google Ads is by far the most popular PPC platform. Within its ad platform, Google also offers ads purely designed for certain types of service businesses to capture local leads — these are called Local Service Ads (LSAs).

Relevant local service ads are displayed for customers when a clear local intent is indicated from their searches, e.g., when they add a town, city or other location: hvac repairs in san francisco or furnace installation in Chicago, for instance.

There are some important differences between LSAs and Google Ads. Most importantly, as the advertiser, you only pay if a customer calls you directly through the ad. It’s strictly a pay-per-lead model rather than a pay-per-click model and this can make it very cost-effective.

Local service ads appear above Google Ads in the SERPS. HVAC businesses rank based on the number of customers they serve and their average review rating. Generally, the three companies with the highest ratings appear at the top like this:

Insert screenshot of LSAs for an HVAC search

There are two basic types of LSAs:

How Can You Become Google Guaranteed?

For HVAC businesses that pass a Google screening and verification process, a Google Guaranteed badge is awarded and will appear next to your name in local service ads. 

(Maybe replace this one with an original screenshot. I got from here: https://www.wilmingtondesignco.com/how-to-become-a-google-guaranteed-hvac-contractor/)

Google Guaranteed is a vote of confidence and credibility from Google that you are a trusted business and will encourage homeowners to hire your services — like free advertising.

To earn a Google Guaranteed badge after signing up to LSAs, Google will perform some free checks on your business: this includes your business license, insurance and customer reviews, as well as a background check of employees. 

DIY With HVAC PPV vs Hiring a Company

As you’ve seen, the stakes are high with PPC for HVAC companies. Success is not guaranteed just because you throw money at a PPC campaign. 

Get it wrong and it could be an expensive lesson. Get it right and it can help dictate the future success of your HVAC business.

With such importance placed on PPC campaigns, you’ll need to ask a simple question: do you have the time and expertise to manage this yourself or is it best left to PPC professionals?

Few HVAC businesses have the in-house expertise to manage PPC and the learning curve is fairly steep — even if you follow the tips in this article, you may be best off outsourcing it. 

You’ll need to do your homework on your PPC professionals if you decide to outsource it. Your return on investment will depend on how well your PPC campaign is managed. Most PPC companies will manage the entire process end-to-end — so you’ll pay a monthly fee for this privilege too.

FAQs

Start Generating a Steady Flow of New HVAC Leads

For an HVAC PPC marketing campaign managed from start to finish by professionals, look no further than Siege Digital Marketing.

We specialize in SEO and PPC for HVAC companies — from planning and keyword research to budget management and ad/landing page optimization right through to testing and conversion tracking/optimization.

We believe in bringing you revenue – not just clicks! Book a free introductory call here.