Furnace season, Local Services Ads and booked calls

The first real cold snap of the 2020 heating season has reached a lot of the country since late October, and the heating contractors we work with all describe the same morning. The phone started before the office opened, the calls kept coming through lunch, and by the afternoon nobody could say how many had gone to voicemail.

That is a normal first cold week. This season has a few things that are not normal, and they change how the ads and the phones should be set up for the rest of the heating season.

What is different about a pandemic winter

Three things stand out in the accounts we run.

• People are home all day. Remote work and remote school mean furnaces run from morning to night in houses that used to sit at a setback temperature until six. More run hours means more failures, and the calls arrive during the working day rather than piling up in the evening.
• Homeowners are nervous about letting someone in. A lot of callers ask, before anything else, what the technician will do inside the house. Masks, shoe covers, how many people come in, whether the family can stay in another room. If the answer is not ready, the call ends with “let me think about it”.
• Replacement decisions are happening at the kitchen table. People who have spent eight months looking at the same rooms are more willing to replace an old system than to patch it one more time, and they are researching it on their phones between video calls.

None of these is a reason to panic about budget. They are reasons to check that the setup matches the winter you are actually going to get.

Local Services Ads: get the badge working before the budget

For heating companies, Local Services Ads are usually the first thing a searcher sees for “furnace repair near me”, above the regular search ads. You pay per lead rather than per click, and the Google Guaranteed badge sits next to your name.

If you are not in yet, start today, because the screening takes time. Google checks your license and insurance, and technicians go through background checks for the category. A company that begins the process in the middle of a cold snap may not be live until the worst of it has passed.

If you are already running, go through the profile with fresh eyes:

1. Job types. Turn on only the jobs you want this winter. If you do not do boiler work, switch it off, or you will pay for leads you have to turn away.
2. Service area. Pick the zip codes you can reach in bad weather with the crew you actually have, not the map you drew in the spring.
3. Schedule. Leads only arrive during the hours you set. If there is nobody to answer after six, set the schedule to match, and widen it once you have coverage.
4. Reviews on the ads profile. They are separate from your Google My Business reviews and they show on the ad itself. Request them from recent customers through the dashboard.
5. Disputes. When a lead is plainly not yours, a parts supplier or a caller two counties away, mark it and ask for the credit. It takes a minute and the credits add up over a season.

Search campaigns with less to go on

Since September 2020 the search terms report hides queries that Google does not consider to have significant volume. For a heating contractor, that is most of the odd long queries that used to show where money was leaking.

So build the defenses in advance instead of finding the leak afterward. Add the negatives you know you will need before they show up: parts, manuals, thermostat wiring, “how to”, jobs, careers, and equipment brands you do not install. Keep repair and replacement in separate campaigns so an emergency week cannot drain the budget that feeds your replacement quotes. And use call extensions or call ads on mobile for repair terms, because someone with a cold house wants to talk, not fill in a form.

For replacement terms, give people a first step that does not require a technician in the kitchen yet. A virtual estimate over a video call, or a photo of the unit’s data plate sent by text, gets the conversation going with a homeowner who is not ready to open the door. If you offer that, say so in the ad and set the “online estimates” attribute on your Google My Business listing, which Google added in spring 2020 for exactly this kind of visit.

A lead is not a booked job

This is where most of the money goes. An ad can produce a call. It cannot answer it.

In the first cold week the pattern in nearly every account is the same: the leads arrive, a share of them ring out, and the ones that ring out book with whoever picked up next. Paid leads that nobody answers are the most expensive thing in a heating company’s winter.

Here is what we are putting in place with clients:

• A named person on the phone at peak times, with a second line that rolls over to the owner or someone in the field office rather than to voicemail.
• An instant text back on every missed call, saying who you are and that someone will call back within the half hour, and then someone actually calling back within the half hour.
• A booking script with the safety answers in it. What the technician wears, how long they will be inside, whether the homeowner needs to be in the room. Read it off a card if that helps. A confident answer books the job.
• A time window, not a promise. “We can be there Thursday between eight and eleven” closes. “Someone will call you to schedule” hands the job to the next company on the list.
• One record for every lead, whatever channel it came from, with the outcome marked: booked, quoted, lost or not a real lead. Without it, nobody can tell in February which ads paid for themselves.

What to do this month

• Start or finish Local Services Ads screening now, and check job types, zip codes and schedule on the profile.
• Add the negatives you know you need before the search terms report can show you why.
• Split repair and replacement into separate campaigns with separate budgets.
• Write the safety answers into the booking script and make sure everyone on the phone uses it.
• Turn on a missed-call text back and hold the team to calling back within thirty minutes.
• Offer virtual or photo estimates for replacements, and set the online estimates attribute on your listing.

A cold snap is the one week a year when demand is not the problem, and the contractors who come out of this winter ahead will be the ones whose phones turned that demand into appointments. That is most of what we do for home services companies in the heating months, and the paid side of it, Local Services and search, sits in our Google Ads management.