Regional HVAC contractor, Southeast US
From referral-only growth to a predictable inbound lead pipeline.
A residential HVAC shop had grown for a decade on word of mouth and truck wraps. They wanted a paid channel that produced booked calls on a predictable weekly cadence, without hiring a full-time marketer or paying an agency to learn on their budget.
Client name withheld under NDA. Details anonymized.
The situation
Referrals had carried the business for years, but the pipeline was lumpy. Great months, dead weeks, no way to plan hiring or inventory. The owner had tried two general marketing agencies before us. Both spent months building strategies and dashboards. Neither produced booked calls at a cost the shop could actually justify.
- No paid channel was running consistently. LSA account existed but was not verified.
- Google Business Profile had 60 plus reviews but no active review flow.
- Landing pages were the homepage. Every ad dumped traffic to the same generic hero.
- No call tracking. The owner could not say which channel was producing which job.
What we built
We ran the standard HVAC playbook in the order that produces booked calls fastest. Local Services Ads first, so the Google Guaranteed badge started producing pay-per-lead calls the moment verification cleared. Then Google Search Ads for higher-intent queries like AC replacement and emergency furnace repair, on tight geo and negative-keyword lists. Then Meta for retargeting and maintenance-plan promo once the first two channels were producing steadily.
- LSA verification, category tuning, and a weekly bad-lead dispute flow.
- Search campaigns split by intent (repair, replacement, tune-up, emergency) with per-campaign landing pages, not the homepage.
- Meta retargeting stack fed by pixel traffic from LSA and Search, plus a maintenance-plan promo campaign.
- Google Business Profile optimization, citations cleanup, and a review-request flow tied to the FSM.
- Call tracking that reports cost per booked job by channel, not clicks or form fills.
The result
The first booked call came in during the first two weeks of LSA going live. Within the first quarter, LSA and Search were running together and producing a steady weekly cadence of calls the CSR team could actually plan around. Cost per booked job dropped every quarter as Search matured and bad-lead disputes on LSA compounded. Meta layered on in month four and started producing retargeted maintenance-plan sign-ups at low cost.
- Time to first booked call after LSA verification, roughly two weeks.
- Cost per booked job trended down every quarter across the first year as Search matured.
- Meaningful share of monthly revenue came from paid channels by end of year one.
- Owner shifted from reactive scheduling to hiring against a forecast built on paid-media cadence.
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