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Heating and ventilation is two businesses in one account
Almost every underperforming HVAC advertising account we have been shown has the same fault, and it is not the bidding. It is that domestic and commercial work, and service and installation work, are all running through one set of keywords with one budget and one idea of what a good enquiry looks like.
They are not the same business. A domestic air conditioning install and a commercial chiller replacement differ by two orders of magnitude in value, by months in decision length, and completely in who does the searching. The homeowner searches in the evening on a phone. The facilities manager searches at eleven in the morning on a desktop and wants a company that looks like it carries the right insurance.
Put them in one campaign and the cheap clicks win the budget, because there are always more of them. The account looks busy and the work does not arrive.
The search terms that mean money
Commercial heating and ventilation demand is low volume and high value, which is exactly the shape search advertising handles best. The terms worth being unmissable on cluster into four groups:
| Group | What the searcher wants | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|
| Breakdown | Chiller, AHU or plant down now | Highest urgency, lowest price sensitivity, frequently becomes a maintenance contract afterwards |
| Maintenance contract | Replacing an incumbent, or first contract | The recurring revenue that makes the whole account worth running |
| Compliance | F-Gas, TM44, statutory inspection | A deadline is forcing the search, so the timeline is short and real |
| Replacement and upgrade | End-of-life plant, efficiency projects | Largest single jobs, longest decision, worth a dedicated page |
Everything else, and there is a lot of it, is either domestic, a homeowner pricing a job they will give to a mate, a student, or a competitor checking your prices. Negative keyword work is not housekeeping in this sector. It is most of the value.
On buying HVAC leads and pay-per-call
The same arithmetic applies here as in any trade: the price of a lead is not the price of a job. Multiply contact rate by quote rate by close rate and divide the lead price by the result. For commercial heating and ventilation there are two extra complications that make bought leads harder to judge than they look:
- Job value varies enormously, so an average cost per lead tells you nothing until you know the mix you are being sent. Ten filter changes and one plant replacement are not eleven leads.
- Decision length outruns the billing cycle. A maintenance contract enquiry in March may become work in September. Judged on a monthly invoice, good leads look like bad ones and get cancelled.
Pay-per-call models solve the contact-rate problem and none of the others. They are worth testing when your problem is genuinely that nobody answers your forms. They are not worth testing when your problem is that you are being sent the wrong kind of work.
What we can and cannot show you
The measured advertising results on this site come from scaffolding, roofing, glazing and surfacing accounts, and they are real: 354 tracked conversions in 30 days on one live Google Ads account at a 21.08% conversion rate, and 41 conversions at £10.79 each on another. The screenshots are on the results page.
We have not run a commercial HVAC account to those numbers, and this page is not going to imply otherwise. What transfers between trades is the method, not the cost per conversion: separating job types into their own campaigns, writing landing pages that answer the specific search, tracking calls back to search terms, and closing the gap between the phone ringing and a price being sent. The methodology page sets out exactly what is measured and what is assumed.
What a working HVAC setup looks like
- Separate campaigns for breakdown, maintenance, compliance and replacement, each with its own budget and its own idea of a good cost per enquiry.
- A page per group, not a services page with four bullet points. Compliance searchers want to see the certification. Breakdown searchers want a phone number and a response time above the fold.
- Call tracking, because in this sector most of the money arrives by phone and an untracked call is an untracked campaign.
- Follow-up that survives a long decision, so a maintenance enquiry from March is still being spoken to in September rather than sitting in an inbox. That is what the CRM and automation side is for.
Running one campaign for domestic and commercial work?That is usually the whole problem, and it is the cheapest thing on this list to fix. Call and we will look at the account split with you.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
What does a commercial HVAC lead cost in the UK?
There is no published independent figure, and anyone quoting one is quoting their own book or a United States dataset relabelled. The benchmarks page explains why: the Competition and Markets Authority obtained the real UK cost figures from Google under statutory powers in its 2020 market study and redacted them from the published version.
Is pay per call better than pay per lead for HVAC?
Pay per call filters out the people who fill in forms and vanish, so the contact rate is higher by definition. It does not filter out the wrong job type, the tenant with no budget authority, or the caller who wanted a domestic boiler when you do commercial plant. Ask what counts as a billable call and what the minimum duration is.
Should a commercial HVAC firm advertise on Google at all?
Usually yes, but on a narrower set of searches than a domestic firm. Commercial work arrives through specific, low-volume, high-value searches: maintenance contracts, plant replacement, F-Gas compliance, chiller breakdown. The budget goes into being unmissable on a small list rather than visible on a long one.
Why does HVAC advertising waste so much money?
Because one campaign covering a £90 filter change and a £40,000 plant replacement bids the same for both. Splitting domestic from commercial, and service from installation, is the single biggest saving available in most HVAC accounts we have looked at.
How long before HVAC advertising produces work?
Search advertising produces enquiries in days and takes weeks to tune. Commercial maintenance contracts then run on their own timetable, because they are bought when the incumbent contract ends, not when your advert appears. Judge paid search on enquiries in month one and on work won over a longer horizon than a domestic trade would.
Do you buy or resell HVAC leads?
No. Campaigns run in your own advertising account, enquiries arrive on your own number, and you keep the account and the history if we stop working together.