Local Services Ads or search ads: splitting an HVAC budget

Heating season budgets get set about now, and this year an HVAC owner is setting them on ground that shifted in August. Google started moving Local Services Ads into Google Ads, and HVAC was named in the first phase alongside plumbing and electrical. Since May the published search benchmarks have been refreshed too, and there is newer data on what happens to the calls those ads produce.

This is how we would split the money for the months ahead, and the numbers behind it.

What a search lead costs, according to the people who publish it

The most specific figures for this trade still come from LocaliQ’s home services benchmarks, which cover April 2024 to March 2025. In the category LocaliQ calls Air Conditioning Installation & Repair, the median click cost $9.68, 6.56% of clicks became leads, and a lead cost $127.74. In Heating & Furnaces, the median click cost $9.30, the conversion rate was 7.48% and a lead cost $129.02. Across all home services in the same window, a click cost $7.85.

WordStream by LocaliQ’s 2026 benchmarks, published in May and covering April 2025 to March 2026, do not break out heating and cooling. The broader Home & Home Improvement category came in at $8.33 a click and an 8.05% conversion rate.

Two cautions before anyone builds a budget on those. They are medians across many advertisers, so one market can sit well above or below them. And they count leads, not booked jobs, which is the only number that pays wages.

How Local Services Ads charge, and what changed in August

Local Services Ads charge per valid lead: a phone call, a message or a booking request. Google’s help pages say message leads are typically priced lower than phone leads, and that lead prices vary with location, job type, lead type and bidding mode. Google also no longer credits leads for “job type not serviced” or “geo not serviced”, so a careless service list now costs real money.

We have not found a published Local Services cost per lead for HVAC that we would put in front of an owner. Anyone quoting you one should be able to say where it came from.

The August change affects how the spend is managed more than how it is charged. Under Google’s migration plan, Local Services campaigns become Performance Max campaigns with pay-per-lead goals, so you still pay for leads rather than clicks. Manual bidding, where you set a maximum price per lead, is removed. Insurance and license reverification stop, and the verification you already passed carries over. The levers you used to pull by hand move to the budget, the job types you select and the quality of the profile behind the ads.

The phone sets the real price of a lead

Google ranks Local Services Ads partly on what it calls profile quality: rating, number of reviews, average response time, use of good photos and the verification checks completed. Response time is on that list for a reason.

Invoca’s 2026 home services report, drawn from calls tracked across its customer base, puts the share of calls to HVAC companies answered by a person at 34%. Plumbing companies in the same report answered 74%, and home services as a whole 52%. Of the HVAC calls that were answered, 45% were genuine leads, and 43% of those converted on the call. In our experience, companies on a call platform like Invoca’s tend to be larger than a three-truck shop, so your own numbers may land higher or lower. The arithmetic holds either way: a lead nobody answers costs full price and returns nothing.

So before raising the heating season budget, fix the answering. Every dollar spent after that does more work.

Split the budget by job, not by channel

The cleanest way we know to divide an HVAC budget is by the kind of work, because each kind has a channel that suits it.

• Emergency repair. No heat in a cold snap, no cooling in a heat wave. Local Services Ads and the map pack carry most of it, because the homeowner wants someone now and taps the first verified company that looks real.
• Replacement. Google search ads pointing at your own pages. EIA’s 2020 Residential Energy Consumption Survey found that about 38% of homes with air conditioning had main equipment ten or more years old, so the pool of systems near the end is large, and those buyers compare quotes. A landing page that explains options and financing properly is where you win them.
• Maintenance and plans. Your own customer list first, then Facebook and Instagram for tune-up offers. WordStream’s 2026 benchmarks for Facebook ads, released this week, put lead form leads in Home & Home Improvement at a median $42.95, well under search, though those leads go cold quickly without a fast call back.

Pace the money by month, not by year

An annual figure is the least useful part of an HVAC budget. In EIA’s data, July 2025 had 391 population-weighted cooling degree days against 5 in January, and the heating side runs the other way round. Equipment demand moves just as hard: AHRI’s July release, issued on September 11, showed 916,830 central air conditioners and air-source heat pumps shipped in July 2026, up 20.1% on July 2025, after a 21.7% rise in June. Year to date, shipments are up 5.5%.

The budget should follow that shape. Raise Local Services and emergency search spend ahead of each peak, shift toward replacement and maintenance in the shoulder months, and never leave one daily budget running unchanged from March to August.

What to do this month

• Open the Google Ads view of your Local Services campaign and check that job types and service areas match the work you actually do, since wrong-job leads are no longer credited.
• Call your own line at 7 pm on a weekday and on a Saturday morning, and fix what happens when nobody picks up.
• Split your search campaigns into emergency, replacement and maintenance, each with its own landing page and budget.
• Write a month-by-month budget for October through March, weighted toward the cold months when no-heat calls arrive.
• Judge every channel on booked jobs and revenue, not leads, before deciding what to cut.

How the year runs for heating and cooling companies, and where their calls come from, is set out on our HVAC marketing page. For how we run Local Services and search side by side, see our Google Ads page, and if the phone is the weak point, our AI voice agents answer and book when the office cannot.