Paid media · Home services
Home service adsthat match the trucks.
HVAC, plumbing, and roofing do not share a calendar or a ticket size. The paid program buys calls you can book inside the area you actually drive.
The short answer
What this paid program covers.
This is one engagement for home service companies: HVAC, plumbing, roofing, or a shop that runs more than one of those trades. The job is a call or a form that becomes a booked job, tracked back to the channel that bought it. Google search is the core. Local Services Ads are a channel we can run beside it when the business can pass verification at a real address. This page is the paid program, not an LSA-only product. We do not invent a storefront, a suite, or a technician to make a profile look stronger.
Buying cycle
Weather, water, and a roof after a storm.
HVAC demand spikes on the first hot week and the first cold snap. The search is 'not cooling' or 'no heat,' and the winner is whoever answers and can roll. Replacement and maintenance are the quieter shoulder-season searches, and they need their own ads. A tune-up offer on a no-cool query wastes the click.
Plumbing is steadier, with spikes for freezes, water heaters, and main lines. Roofing follows storms, then a long quote for replacement. Those are three calendars. A flat monthly budget treats July like February. It strands trucks in a heat wave or buys roofing clicks with no crew. We would rather miss a click than advertise 'today' for a job you cannot schedule.
Constraints
The real depot, the real radius, the real hours.
Ads, location assets, and Local Services Ads use the address and the phone you actually operate. If you hide your address, we do not rent a mailbox to look like a storefront. That pattern gets profiles suspended and it sends a homeowner to a place with no trucks. The service area in the account matches dispatch. A suburb you refuse to drive to is not a target.
Licenses, after-hours rules, and financing have to be true. If you do not roll at 9 p.m., the ad does not say 24 hours. If financing is for replacement only, above a dollar amount, through a named lender, the ad says that. Storm work does not imply a license, an insurance claim outcome, or a crew you do not have.
- One set of name, address, and phone details across ads, the site, and Local Services Ads.
- No fake storefronts, no virtual offices, no stock crew presented as your technicians.
- After-hours claims match the on-call rotation you run this month.
- Trade and brand authorizations named only when you hold them.
Channels and KPIs
Search and LSA, judged on booked jobs.
Google search campaigns split by trade and by intent: repair, replacement, maintenance. Call-only or call-heavy ads where the job is a phone call. Forms where the job is a replacement quote. Local Services Ads can run in the same program, with their own budget and their own number, so a charged lead is not double-counted as a search call. Microsoft can take the same repair terms when the phones can absorb them.
Meta is a weak fit for a burst pipe and a reasonable test for a planned replacement or a maintenance club, inside the real radius. The scorecard is answered calls, booked jobs, and cost per booked job by trade. Raw calls are not the goal. A week of missed calls means the budget is ahead of the board, and we pull it back.
- Separate call pools for search, Local Services Ads, and the website.
- Booked jobs by trade, not a single 'lead' column.
- Answer rate and time to answer during spikes.
- Spend moved with weather and crew capacity, not a flat daily cap year-round.
Mistakes
One campaign called home services.
The failure mode is a single campaign bidding on HVAC, plumbing, and roofing, pointed at a homepage, with one phone number shared by the trucks, the website, and LSA. Nobody can say which trade paid for itself. The other failure is a fake address used to win the map.
- No address that is not a place you operate from, with trucks.
- No 24-hour claim the on-call tech has not agreed to.
- No storm ads that promise an insurance result or a same-day roof you cannot build.
- No shared number that makes search, LSA, and organic the same pile of calls.
Example engagement
Regional HVAC company, 4 trucks.
Regional HVAC company, 4 trucks, one depot. Paid search was already carrying the hot weeks. The account mixed repair and replacement, and the number on the trucks was also on the ads, so organic and paid were inseparable. There was no Local Services Ads profile yet. A vendor had suggested a virtual office.
We split repair, replacement, and maintenance, limited the geo to dispatch, and opened Local Services Ads on the depot address. Search and LSA each got a tracking number. Shoulder months moved toward maintenance and replacement. Heat weeks went back to no-cool terms only while the board could take the calls. We did not invent a second location, and we did not publish a lead count as a benchmark.
4 trucks
One depot. Ads used that address and that radius
Search + LSA
Separate numbers, same real location
The example uses anonymized results from a Quorum engagement. It is one account, not a benchmark you should budget against.
Questions
Home services questions.
Is this a Local Services Ads package?
No. Local Services Ads are one channel inside the paid program, next to search, when you can verify at a real address. Some companies should run both. Some should run search only until the profile, the reviews, and the hours are honest. We will not sell LSA as the whole plan or open it on a mailbox.
We do HVAC and plumbing. One account or two?
One account is fine. Separate campaigns, ads, and landing pages are not optional. A homeowner with no heat and a homeowner with a water heater should not hit the same headline. Budgets move independently because the seasons do not match. Roofing, if you add it, gets the same treatment.
How do you change budget when the weather breaks?
We agree in advance which campaigns are allowed to spend faster in a spike, and which daily caps exist so you do not buy more calls than the trucks can run. After the spike, the caps come back down. Leaving July's budget on in October is how maintenance season gets crowded out by leftover repair terms.
What counts as a lead?
A call or form that matches a trade you perform, inside the area you serve, that your team had a chance to book. Hangups, wrong numbers, and solicitors come out. A booked job is better and we use it when dispatch will mark it. A click is never the lead.
Can you advertise financing?
Only the offer the lender and your paperwork actually support, on the jobs it applies to. 'Zero percent for everyone' is how a replacement call turns into an argument in the kitchen. If the terms change, the ad changes the same day.
Do you build city pages as part of this?
No. City and service pages are an SEO and web job. Paid sends people to the pages you already have, or to a short landing page when the site cannot take the click. We will not stand up a doorway page per suburb to give an ad somewhere to land.
Talk through home services.
One conversation. A diagnostic. A plan you can kill if it is not the work.