HVAC Advertising: Google Ads and Local Services Ads

This post covers how an HVAC, plumbing, roofing or electrical company should run Google paid search: where Local Services Ads fit, how to build Search around them, and how to measure booked jobs. For the phone-tracking setup itself, read call tracking for lead generation.

How Local Services Ads work for home services

Local Services Ads (LSA) charge per lead. You pay for each valid lead: a phone call you answer, a message, a voicemail or a booking request. Lead prices vary with your location, the job type and the lead type (Local Services Help).

Google screens leads at the moment of contact and doesn’t charge for the ones it judges invalid or low quality. It also reassesses charged leads over time and credits the low-quality ones on its own, in most cases within 30 days. You can flag a bad lead through the feedback survey on that lead (Local Services Help). Check your lead list every week anyway. Wrong-number calls, job seekers and parts suppliers still slip through.

Ranking depends on your bid and on how likely you are to turn the search into a lead: responsiveness (missed calls count against you), relevance to the search, and profile quality, which covers your rating, number of reviews, average response time and photos (Local Services Help). If your office lets calls roll to voicemail at lunch, you pay for it in position.

Google Guaranteed is now Google Verified

In late 2025, Google replaced the Google Guaranteed, Google Screened and License Verified by Google badges with a single Google Verified badge, and discontinued the Money Back Guarantee for services booked from December 7, 2025 (Local Services Help). The badge tells customers you passed Google’s screening and verification.

Where LSA is available, and what changed in 2026

LSA runs in the US, Canada and a set of European countries, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain, with a different category list in each (Local Services Help). In the US, HVAC, plumbers, electricians and roofers are all eligible categories.

The bigger change is in how you manage it. From August 2026, Google started moving US Local Services Ads for plumbing, HVAC, electrical, roofing and other home-service categories into Google Ads as Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals. Verified status carries over, manual bidding such as a maximum cost per lead is gone, and non-US accounts follow in 2027 (Google Ads Help). Google recommends running these pay-per-lead campaigns alongside Search (Google Ads Help).

How LSA and Search ads split the work

LSA owns the top block for broad “near me” and category searches, and you pay only when someone contacts you. It gives you little control: no keyword list, no landing page, no ad copy, and since the migration, no bid cap.

Search gives you that control. Use it for:

• High-value jobs. “Furnace replacement”, “heat pump installation” and “new AC unit cost” deserve their own ads and pages.
• Emergency terms. “No heat”, “AC not cooling”, “burst pipe” and “24 hour plumber” carry the most urgent intent. You want control over copy and hours here.

Run both and read the leads as one pipeline. The useful number is cost per booked job across LSA and Search together.

How to structure HVAC Search campaigns by service

Split campaigns by job type, because each one has a different value and a different landing page:

1. Repair and emergency. “AC repair”, “furnace repair”, “no heat”, “emergency HVAC”. Short sales cycle, mostly calls.
2. Replacement and installation. “AC replacement”, “new furnace”, “heat pump install”, “HVAC system cost”. Higher ticket, longer cycle, more form fills and quote requests.
3. Maintenance and tune-ups. “AC tune up”, “furnace maintenance”, service plans. Low ticket, useful in shoulder months and for filling the schedule.
4. Brand. Your company name, in its own campaign so it doesn’t inflate the numbers of the others.

Plumbing, roofing and electrical follow the same pattern: emergency repair, planned replacement or installation, and maintenance or inspection.

Separate campaigns let you set budgets and targets per job type. A replacement lead can justify many times the cost of a tune-up lead, and one blended campaign can’t express that.

Which location setting should a service-area business use?

Google offers two inclusion options: Presence or interest, the default, reaches people in, regularly in, or who’ve shown interest in your locations. Presence reaches only people in or regularly in them (Google Ads Help).

For a service-area business, choose Presence. Someone in another state reading about your city doesn’t need a technician there. Target the ZIP codes or radius your trucks cover, and exclude the areas you don’t serve. Check the location report monthly.

Set the ad schedule around emergency hours

The ad schedule lets you choose the days and hours your ads run and adjust bids by time (Google Ads Help). Match it to your real operating model:

• If you run 24/7 emergency service, keep the repair and emergency campaign on around the clock and let the replacement campaign run during office hours.
• If nobody answers after 7 pm, schedule call assets to show only when someone picks up (Google Ads Help), and point after-hours traffic to a booking form.

Fix staffing or scheduling before you raise bids.

Call assets replace call-only ads

Put a call asset on every Search campaign. For repair searches, the phone call is the conversion. Clicks on the call button cost the same as headline clicks (Google Ads Help).

If your account still relies on call-only ads, plan the move now. Google removed the option to create new call-only ads in February 2026, and existing ones stop serving in February 2027. The replacement is responsive search ads with call assets (Google Ads Help).

Negative keywords every home-services account needs

Start with a shared negative list and apply it to all Search campaigns:

• Jobs: jobs, hiring, salary, technician training, apprenticeship, certification, school.
• DIY: how to, diy, yourself, youtube, video, manual, diagram.
• Parts: parts, capacitor, thermostat wire, filter size, wholesale, supply house.
• Wrong fit: car AC, RV, window unit (if you don’t service them), free.

Negative keywords don’t match close variants, so add plurals and other word forms yourself (Google Ads Help). Review the search terms report weekly in the first months.

How to handle heating and cooling seasonality

HVAC demand follows the weather: cooling searches climb in summer, heating searches in winter, and spring and fall go quiet. Plan budgets by season:

• Shift budget between the cooling and heating campaigns as the season turns, instead of running both at full spend all year.
• Push maintenance and tune-up campaigns in the shoulder months, when your technicians have open slots.
• Leave Smart Bidding alone through normal seasonal swings. Google says it already accounts for seasonal events and reserves seasonality adjustments for short, expected changes of 1 to 7 days (Google Ads Help), such as a forecast heat wave.

Build a landing page for each service

Send each campaign to a page about that job: AC repair to an AC repair page, furnace replacement to a replacement page. Each page needs:

• A click-to-call phone number at the top, the same number as your call asset or a tracked equivalent.
• A short booking or quote form: name, phone, ZIP, service needed.
• Service area, hours, licensing and reviews close to the top.
• For replacement pages: financing options and what an estimate includes.

A homepage can’t do this for four different jobs. We build these pages as part of our landing page and CRO work.

What is an HVAC lead worth?

Work out a value per lead type before you set targets. A hypothetical example:

• Repair lead: say a booked repair averages $400 in revenue and half your repair leads book. Each repair lead is worth about $200 in revenue.
• Replacement lead: say a new system averages $10,000 and one in five replacement leads signs. Each replacement lead is worth about $2,000 in revenue.

At those numbers, you can afford to pay several times more for a replacement lead than for a repair lead. Apply your own gross margin before you set a target cost per lead.

Track booked jobs as well as calls

Set up a “Calls from ads” conversion with a minimum call length you choose, plus a conversion for calls to the number on your website (Google Ads Help). That gets you call counts. It doesn’t tell you which calls became jobs.

To bid on jobs, pass outcomes from your CRM or field-service software back to Google Ads: booked job, and job value for replacements. Our call tracking guide covers the phone side, and offline conversion tracking covers sending booked and sold jobs back. Our conversion tracking setup connects the two.

Once Google sees booked jobs with values, it can bid harder on replacement searches and ease off tune-ups that don’t pay for themselves. That’s how we run Google Ads for lead generation and our Google Ads management. For a second opinion on your account, start with a free Profit Growth Plan.

FAQ

Are Local Services Ads better than Google Search ads for HVAC?

They do different jobs. LSA charges per lead and takes the top block for broad local searches, with little control. Search gives you keywords, copy, landing pages and schedules. In the US, run both.

Can I get a refund for a bad Local Services Ads lead?

Google reassesses charged leads and credits low-quality ones on its own, in most cases within 30 days. You can also report a bad lead through its feedback survey (Local Services Help).

Should HVAC ads use “Presence” or “Presence or interest”?

Presence. You can only serve people in your area, and “Presence or interest” also reaches people who only searched about it (Google Ads Help).

What negative keywords should an HVAC company add?

Job and training terms, DIY and “how to” terms, parts and supply terms, and equipment you don’t service. Add plural and other word forms yourself, because negatives don’t match close variants.