Emergency and replacement intent should never share a campaign
The two buyers have different urgency, different ticket sizes and different landing pages, so they need different budgets, schedules and bids.
A no-cool searcher wants a truck. Short copy, phone-first, call extensions live, ad schedule matched to whoever is actually answering.
A replacement searcher wants confidence. Financing, equipment options, what a proper sizing calculation involves, what the install day looks like. A call-only ad wastes that person.
Keep them apart and you can see the truth in the account: emergency usually returns faster and smaller, replacement slower and larger. Blended together they hide each other.
We would also carve out maintenance agreements separately. Agreement subscribers are the cheapest source of future changeouts you will ever have, and they justify a bid the raw ticket size does not.
The negative keyword list is the real asset in an HVAC account
Most wasted spend in this trade is not bad bidding, it is paying for people who cannot hire you.
Start with the obvious families: parts and filter sizes, DIY and repair tutorials, window units and portable units, appliance repair, hiring and trade school queries, and anything with a manufacturer part number.
Then the local ones. Tenants searching about landlord obligations, condo residents whose association owns the equipment, and price-shoppers looking for used or scratch and dent equipment.
Broad match with a thin negative list is how the money leaves. Review search terms weekly at the start, then monthly once the shape settles.
Every negative you add should be defensible from the search terms report. Guessing at negatives is how contractors accidentally block "ac not cooling".
Draw the geography on the county line and your drive times, not the metro
A radius around West Palm Beach spends money in places your trucks reach late or not at all, and Palm Beach County has boundaries that matter operationally.
Build targeting from where you can be inside your promised window, not from a circle. Royal Palm Beach and Lake Worth Beach may be very different drives at four on a weekday than they look on a map.
Set location targeting to presence rather than presence or interest. Otherwise you buy clicks from people researching Palm Beach County from somewhere else entirely.
Bid adjustments by ZIP earn their keep once you have enough booked jobs to see the pattern. Some areas convert at a different rate for reasons that have nothing to do with the ad.
If your trucks stop at the Broward line, say so in the targeting and in the ad copy. A qualified no is cheaper than an unqualified call.
Local Services Ads reward the licence paperwork you already keep
The Google Guaranteed profile sits above the standard results and is generally gated on licence and insurance verification, which is a filter that favours established contractors.
Verification usually asks for your licence and general liability documentation. A state-certified DBPR contractor and a holder of a Palm Beach County Certificate of Competency both have the paperwork; the friction is administrative, not real.
LSA is priced per lead and judged on responsiveness and reviews, which means it behaves more like a dispatch channel than a media buy. Treat missed calls there as a spend problem, because they are.
Run it alongside search rather than instead of it. LSA tends to bring service and repair volume; the replacement conversation still usually starts with a click to your site.
Dispute bad leads promptly. The credit process is unglamorous and it is real money over a season.
Pace budget against dispatch capacity, not evenly across the month
Spending steadily while your board is full is how contractors pay to annoy people they cannot serve.
When the schedule is jammed, throttle the emergency campaigns and hold spend on replacement, where a next-week appointment is normal and expected.
When the board is soft, do the reverse. Ad schedules should follow who is actually answering the phone, including after-hours if you staff it, and should not be running at 11pm if the call rolls to voicemail.
Demand for this trade is seasonal and lumpy in South Florida. Pacing rules written once and left alone quietly overspend in the weeks that need it least.
Give the office one lever they can pull without calling the agency. Capacity changes faster than any monthly reporting cycle.
Cost per booked changeout is the number the report should end on
Cost per lead rewards the campaigns producing the cheapest, worst enquiries, so the measurement has to reach into the CRM.
Call tracking with dynamic number insertion, one number per channel, and call recording where permitted. Then someone tags outcomes: booked, not booked, wrong service, no answer.
Push booked jobs and revenue back into the ad platform as offline conversions. Bidding on a signal that means money changes what the algorithm optimises toward.
Report three lines by campaign: leads, booked jobs, booked changeouts. If a keyword theme produces leads but no changeouts for a full season, it is a cost centre.
Also report what you turned down. Out-of-area calls are a targeting fix, not a bad month.
Questions we actually get
- What should we budget to start?
- Work backwards from capacity, not from a benchmark. Decide how many additional booked jobs a week you can serve without hurting response times, estimate the average ticket, and set a spend where the arithmetic still works if the first eight weeks run worse than expected. We would rather start smaller and scale on evidence than book a number we cannot defend.
- Should we only run ads in the hot months?
- No. Off-peak is when replacement research and maintenance agreement sign-ups are cheapest to reach and when your competitors go quiet. What changes seasonally is the mix: heavier on emergency and repair when the phone is ringing anyway, heavier on replacement and agreements when it is not.
- Are Local Services Ads better than regular Google Ads?
- They answer different problems. LSA generally brings service volume and is judged on how fast you answer and how you are reviewed. Standard search is where the replacement conversation starts and where you control the landing page. Most contractors of your size should run both and measure them separately.
- How do we stop paying for tenants, students and DIY searchers?
- A negative keyword list built from your own search terms report, refreshed on a schedule rather than once at launch, plus landing page copy and a form that qualifies rather than flatters. Some of that traffic is worth blocking outright; some is worth letting through and disqualifying in ten seconds on the phone.
- How do you know an ad actually produced a booked job?
- Tracked numbers by channel, outcome tagging in your CRM, and offline conversion import back into the ad account. It requires your office to tag consistently, which is the only real ask we make of your team. Without it, any agency reporting on this channel is reporting on clicks and calling them results.
