HVAC Advertising Agency
Every Ad Dollar, Traced to a Booked Job.
Google, Local Services, Meta, and now ChatGPT all want your budget, and each one sends you a report that makes itself look good. I put them on one scoreboard, priced by what a booked job actually cost, and move the money every week toward whichever one is earning it.
- Search, Local Services Ads, Performance Max, Meta, and ChatGPT Ads run as one plan, not 4 vendors
- Every call and form traced to the channel, campaign, and search that produced it
- Budget moved weekly toward what is booking, away from what is not
- Ad accounts, pixels, and data in your name from day one
HVAC companies we have worked with
5 places to buy a homeowner’s attention. Each one is a different deal.
Different pricing, different intent, different failure modes. The mistake is running them as 5 separate line items with 5 separate reports.
Google Search
Pay per click, on the searches that happen the moment something breaks or a quote comes in too high. Wins on structure: branded split from non-branded, repair split from replacement.
Local Services Ads
Pay per lead, above the paid results, Google Verified badge on. Position follows proximity, rating, and how fast you answer. Now managed inside Google Ads as pay-per-lead Performance Max.
Performance Max
Google’s automated buy across Search, Maps, YouTube, and Display. Useful once tracking is clean and there are enough booked jobs to train it. Dangerous before that, because it optimizes toward whatever you feed it.
Meta Ads
The homeowners who need you but have not searched yet: aging systems, new movers, financing offers, plus retargeting that brings the warm ones back. Priced per impression, so creative and audience do the work.
ChatGPT Ads
Sponsored placement inside the AI answer, for the homeowner asking who to call instead of what to search. New, thin on benchmarks, and worth a controlled test in markets where AI answers already show up for your services.
Landing pages and intake
The part every channel depends on. One page per intent, a number that gets answered, and a booking rate we watch as closely as the click. If this leaks, every channel above is overpriced.
Why one scoreboard
Your name costs $34 a lead. A stranger costs $149.
The blended number, $104 a lead, is the one most reports show you. It hides that the account is really 2 accounts with 2 different jobs. Multiply that by 5 channels and a blended report is not a scoreboard, it is a fog machine. We price every channel by what a booked job cost, branded separate from non-branded, and put them side by side every week.
Source: SearchLight Digital benchmark, January 1 to 31, 2026, one vendor’s 816 HVAC and plumbing client accounts, spend-weighted and outlier-filtered; not an industry survey. Published February 12, 2026, updated March 27, 2026. HVAC and plumbing; one vendor’s clients.
What we do, in order.
Tracking before spend. Intake before scale. We do not raise a budget we cannot trace to a job or that the shop cannot answer.
Audit
Every channel, campaign, and landing page against one question: did it produce a booked job or just a click, a lead, or a like.
Tracking
Call tracking, form tracking, and the connection to your job software, so a lead becomes a job in the data, not just in the truck.
Sequence
Which channel gets the first dollar, and which waits. Search and LSA usually first, because the intent is already there. Meta and ChatGPT once the base is booking.
Structure
Branded pulled out on its own. Repair, replacement, and maintenance split, each with its own target, on every channel that allows it.
Pages and creative
One landing page per intent and creative built for the channel it runs on. A homeowner with a dead compressor does not want to read about financing.
Intake
Missed-call texts, after-hours routing, and a booking rate we watch as closely as the click. The ad is only half the purchase.
Budget
Moved every week toward whichever channel and campaign is producing booked jobs cheapest, away from the ones that are not.
Where is your budget leaking?
Then it repeats every week against the numbers, and the strategy gets reviewed every 30 days.
The 2 ways an HVAC ad budget disappears.
Buying calls the shop cannot answer
The ad worked. The phone rang. It went to voicemail at 4:40 on a Friday in July. Every channel charged you either way. If the shop cannot answer and book what it already gets, we fix that first, before we buy one more click, lead, or impression.
Letting the platform grade its own homework
Google, Meta, and OpenAI each report the conversions their own pixel saw, attributed the way that flatters them. Add the 3 reports together and you have more leads than your CRM does. One scoreboard, fed by your call tracking and your job software, is the only version that adds up.
Both show up on the audit in the first 2 weeks. Neither shows up in a platform dashboard, ever.
What the benchmarks say, and what they do not.
$51
per HVAC lead on Local Services Ads in February 2026, at a 44.0% book rate and a $2,110 average ticket, across 409 accounts and $1.52 million in spend.
Source: SearchLight Home Services LSA Benchmark, February 1 to 28, 2026, 888 contractors, 1,774 campaigns, spend-weighted, outlier-filtered; gross spend before credits. One vendor’s client accounts, in heating season. Not comparable to the January search figures above.
24.2%
book rate on non-branded AC installation searches in January, against 38.2% for heating repair. Same accounts, same month. The season decides what the click is worth.
Source: same SearchLight January 2026 benchmark. January is heating season; AC figures are out of season. Directional.
$9.68
median cost per click for air conditioning installation and repair, $9.30 for heating and furnaces, in a separate dataset of 3,211 US home-services campaigns.
Source: LocaliQ 2025 home-services search benchmark, campaigns run by LocaliQ customers, April 1, 2024 to March 21, 2025, medians. One vendor’s customer campaigns, not an industry sample.
Every one of these is one vendor’s client data, and none of it covers Meta or ChatGPT Ads for HVAC, because no clean public benchmark exists yet. None of it is your market. The only benchmark that matters is what a booked job cost you last month, by channel, and we build that number before we spend a dollar more.
What you get every week.
- Cost per booked job, by channel and by campaign, branded separate from non-branded.
- Calls and forms tied to the channel and the search or audience that produced them.
- Book rate on the leads each channel sent, not just lead count.
- Ad accounts, pixels, tracking, and data in your name.
- Budget moved weekly toward what is booking, strategy reviewed every 30 days.
- My cell. Account questions answered within 24 hours, usually minutes.
Who you are working with
I spend my own money on these campaigns.
I left the 75th Ranger Regiment in 2005 and went straight into marketing. I started working on HVAC in 2009 and it has been the focus since. I buy and help run HVAC companies as well as market them, which means ad spend is a line on my own P and L, not just yours. When we talk about what a booked job costs, I am reading the same scoreboard you are.
Send me the accounts and the call log and I will tell you which channel is earning its budget and which is coasting on a good report. If I can help, I will say so. If the answer is that your intake is the problem and not the ads, I will say that too, and it costs you nothing either way.
You always have access to the CEO. Text me a question right now and see.
Henry “Hank Hugh” Hernandez, Founder, HVAC Digital Marketing
Special Operations, 75th Ranger Regiment
Combined team track record
Combined team track record across our team, network, and partners
Growth Audit
Find out what a booked job costs you, by channel.
3 questions to start. We pull every account you are running, split branded from non-branded, and tell you what a booked job cost by channel last month and where the budget is leaking. Straight answers, no pitch. If we cannot help, we say so.
HVAC contractors only. Your answers stay between us.
Start here. 2 minutes.
Fee is always separate from ad spend. The number lands in the proposal after the call.
Questions HVAC owners ask about advertising.
Which channel should I start with?
Usually Google Search and Local Services Ads, because the homeowner has already told Google what she needs. Meta and ChatGPT Ads come once the base is booking and tracked, because they buy attention before intent and need a working funnel behind them. The audit tells you where your market is different.
How much should I spend?
Enough to buy a readable sample of booked jobs in the channels that matter, and no more until the tracking proves it. We put the number in the proposal after we have seen the accounts and the market. Fee is always separate from ad spend.
Are ChatGPT Ads worth it for HVAC yet?
In some markets, as a controlled test with its own tracking, once Search and LSA are already booking. There is no clean HVAC benchmark for it yet, and anyone quoting you one is quoting their own guess. We test it the way we test anything: small, tracked to the booked job, and cut or scaled on the numbers.
My agency says the accounts are theirs. Are they?
They should not be. Ad accounts, pixels, conversion tracking, and history are set up in your name from day one with us. If you are stuck in someone else’s accounts today, text me the situation and we will walk you through getting them back or rebuilding them clean.
Why are my leads so bad?
Usually one of 3 things: the campaign is buying the wrong intent, the landing page is answering a different question than the homeowner asked, or the leads are fine and nobody is booking them. The audit tells you which. 2 of the 3 are not an ads problem.
Can you run 1 channel and leave the rest alone?
Yes. One channel or all of them, same standards either way. We will still tell you what we see in the other ones.
What does it cost?
It depends on the market and what is in the way, and our fee is always separate from ad spend so you can see what you are paying for. We put the number in the proposal after the call, not before it.
Find out what each channel is really buying.
Send us the accounts and the market. We come back with what a booked job cost by channel last month, and where the next dollar should go.