HVAC PPC Agency

What is Paid Ads Management for Heating/Cooling Companies?

The act of creating and optimizing paid advertising campaigns for heating/cooling companies is known as hvac contractor PPC management. Despite that simple explanation, let's explore it further.

To provide expert PPC management, a paid ads agency for hvac contractors should get to know you and your goals. Since the way you approach PPC advertising for a local heating/cooling company is much different than how you would for a nationwide hvac contractor ecommerce brand, this information helps determine the next steps.

For example, local heating/cooling companies are often only interested in contact form submissions or phone calls. To accomplish this, paid ads can generate traffic to a landing page or sales funnel that is optimized. We recommend Google Local Service Ads or Facebook Lead Forms if those pages/funnels don't exist or need to be reworked.

In contrast, ecommerce-focused heating/cooling companies are most likely to be interested in online sales. This can be accomplished through paid advertising that grows traffic to an optimized product page or category page. You might even want to include Google Shopping Campaigns in some cases. Our sales funnels have also helped us to sell subscriptions, products, and services.

Understanding the metrics that will be used to optimize and scale hvac contractor paid ads campaigns is the next step. For some heating/cooling companies, that means looking to platforms like Google Analytics. However, there are other options out there too, like Wicked Reports, Triple Whale, or Northbeam.

To be successful with paid ads, your heating/cooling company needs to use multiple strategies and marketing tools. Some of the best PPC advertising packages for heating/cooling companies include tactics to:

• Drive traffic to your digital assets (websites, sales funnels, etc) from search engines, social channels, and third-party websites.
• Make money online or through qualified leads for your heating/cooling company.
• Integrate third-party attribution tools to better understand ad attribution.
• Provide social proof with case studies, white papers, video testimonials, etc.
• Build and nurture relationships through user generated content, story creation, and email address collection.
• Test ad creatives across various ad placements and between different media formats.

Tips for Managing PPC for HVAC Contractors

We are a team of paid advertising consultants with extensive knowledge in the latest paid ads trends for heating/cooling companies and other industries.

Here are some of our best tips to follow for keyword research, audience research, landing page / sales funnel optimization, conversion rate optimization, and ad creation.

1.) Keyword Research Tips

In the context of paid ads, keyword research for hvac contractors largely relates to Google Ads and Bing Ads search campaigns. After all, search ads only show up based on what your heating/cooling company targets on Google or Bing.

A search for "nearby hvac contractor" on a search engine, for example, might lead someone to a heating/cooling company website in their area. It wouldn't be necessary to conduct extensive keyword research to target that exact phrase.

However, what if the exact match keyword isn't generating enough search volume and the heating/cooling company needs to expand their advertising reach? The solution would require keyword research.

After discussing options, the next step might involve the paid advertising manager talking with the heating/cooling company about what products / services they want to target more often and where. A broader keyword targeting plan than exact matches might also be necessary.

As an example, the PPC manager might find that "nearby heating/cooling companies" and "hvac contractor services" have high search volumes. The first phrase is targeting a type of business or organization in the area. In the second phrase, a service is being targeted, which might result in a more lucrative conversion opportunity.

When building negative keyword lists, keyword research can also be beneficial. You can use negative keywords to prevent your paid ads from showing in search queries that you know won't convert to more homeowners.

For example, someone searching for "free services from heating/cooling companies" or "how to advertise to hvac contractors" isn't likely to convert with your heating/cooling company. Your paid advertising may appear if you use broad keyword targeting without negative keywords such as "free" or "advertise".

You can see that as you scale your ads and reduce wasted ad spend, the needs for keyword research become more complex.

2.) Audience Research Tips

When you hear audience research talked about for heating/cooling company PPC advertising campaigns, it is often within the scope of scaling social ads on Facebook and Instagram. There are options within Google Ads and Bing Ads for audience targeting as well though.

Let's go over a little history on audience research and targeting within the Facebook Ads platform.

In years past, hvac contractor-focused paid ads managers relied heavily on building out their own custom audiences within Facebook. After all, one of the most attractive features of the Facebook Ads platform was the data it collected on its users, which hvac contractors lined up to exploit.

As time went on, data privacy and machine learning both had an impact on custom audiences.

When Apple released its iOS 14.5 update, they included a pop up message that allowed users to easily opt out of personalized ad tracking. This had a negative impact on Facebook's ability to track user behavior on mobile devices. In fact, it even affected the accuracy of ad attribution reporting.

Then came improvements to their machine learning algorithms, which greatly diminished the need for custom audiences and lookalike audiences for most ad companies for hvac contractors. Their algorithm has become so good at understanding your ideal audience that you typically do more harm than good by choosing your own interest-based targeting.

While there will still be plenty of heating/cooling company paid advertising agencies relying on custom audiences, the trend is moving toward broad targeting. You can see it in every update within Facebook Ads Manager as they slowly remove interest-based targeting options, or push for "Advantage Detailed Targeting."

This blog article from Social Media Examiner does a good job of talking about recent changes to audience targeting, if you'd like a second opinion.

This isn't to say audience research and targeting is going away. There will always be targeting options that can be manipulated within hvac contractor ad campaigns to squeeze a little extra performance.

3.) Landing Page Optimization Tips

The quality of your landing page will be a big factor in the success of your heating/cooling company paid advertising campaigns.

When we take on the management of a PPC advertising campaign for hvac contractors, we start by looking over the landing pages to see if they follow best practices. Here are some of the factors we look for in this review:

• Is there a benefit-focused headline?
• Are there any images above the fold?
• Is the content written in a compelling manner?
• Am I able to find a lead form right away?
• Are the call to actions easily noticeable?
• Does the page load quickly?
• Is there social proof?
• Am I able to load the page on a mobile device?

There are so many factors that come into the design and development of a quality landing page. Here is a great blog article about what makes a results-driven landing page.

Please, don't spend money on paid advertising until you have a landing page that follows best practices! Ideally, you should never consider your landing page to be finished. Try running A/B testing every few months to continue refining your sales pitch.

4.) Sales Funnel Tips

As an alternative to a landing page, you might want to consider building out one or more sales funnels. We rely heavily on sales funnels for lead generation, email audience building, and even online purchases.

For example, we have a client that promotes an online fitness challenge that you could even join from your local area. While managing their digital marketing we built multiple sales funnels within Click Funnels. Here are some of the funnels we made:

• We used squeeze pages to help capture email addresses while building awareness for the program.
• We used lead magnets to provide people with healthy eating tips, fitness tips, webinars, and sneak peaks in exchange for an email address.
• We used application funnels to push people toward the idea of wanting to apply to participate in exclusive programs.
• We used sales letter funnels to serve as the registration system for the online program.

There are many different types of funnels, so your heating/cooling company isn't limited to only these options. Just keep in mind these can be incredibly helpful for gauging interest in a product or service, building out an email subscriber base, and selling a product or service online.

5.) Conversion Optimization Tips

Having a clear understanding of your conversion rate is critical to making informed advertising decisions. The average conversion rate is between 1-3%, but that varies greatly between industries, products, and services.

Let's run through a basic scenario to help illustrate the impact of conversion rates.

1. You sell a $100 product or service on your site.
2. You have a 1% conversion rate, meaning for every 100 people who visit your website you sell 1 product or service.
3. You have a $1.00 average cost per click (CPC), meaning for each person who visits your website you spend $1.00.
4. To sell 1 product or service, you need 100 clicks from paid advertising, which would cost you $100. This is known as your cost per acquisition (CPA).
5. Your return on ad spend (ROAS) would be 1x, meaning for every dollar spent in PPC advertising you get one dollar in return.

For most heating/cooling companies, this return on ad spend wouldn't be acceptable. Sadly, we often see this type of ROAS when jumping into new client accounts.

To improve the situation, you hire a paid advertising firm to modify your campaign settings, ad creatives, and landing page experience.

Let's assume those improvements bring your conversion rate up from 1% to 2%. That means for every 100 visits to your website you now sell 2 products. This is twice the return on ad spend! You might be profitable now selling that product or service, if your margins are good.

Understanding your conversion rate, and knowing how to improve it, can be crucial to the management of your PPC advertising.

6.) Ad Creation Tips

This is potentially one of the most important aspects of a Facebook Ads account, but it also applies to Google Display Ads.

When you run Facebook Ads or Instagram Ads for hvac contractors, you are mostly targeting a cold audience that is more interested in quickly scrolling by advertisements in favor of seeing what their friends and family are up to online.

You should develop an understanding of how to capture someone's attention in a split second.

To do this, you need to build out good looking ad creatives that make someone stop for a second and say to themselves, "wait a second, what...?"

This doesn't happen by running the same ad creative over and over and over again. Even if it is a good ad, it will eventually become stale. You should change things up frequently, even if you are just targeting people nearby.

If you don't change out your ad creatives and test new ideas, you'll suffer from what is called "ad fatigue." This is the state in which your target audience has already seen your ad so many times that they instinctively scroll by it without ever interacting with your brand.

Don't be caught in this situation. You should understand when to pause an ad because it isn't performing as well as it once did. You should understand when to test new ideas, especially if you are emotionally attached to an ad that you spent a lot of time making.

Pricing for Heating/Cooling Company PPC Management

Our PPC management service fees are determined by the amount of time you wish us to spend on your campaigns every month. Below is the starting cost for our PPC ads management plans, but we are happy to have a conversation about adjusting the budget if your ad spend or service requirements exceed our initial estimate.

Types of Paid Ads for Heating/Cooling Companies

There are numerous ways to run paid ads for your heating/cooling company. The following are some of the most common paid advertisements options for hvac contractors.

1.) Local Ads

Nearby ads for your heating/cooling company can be run through nearly any advertising platform. Depending on the nature of your local heating/cooling company, you may find better success in one platform versus another. To find out which option works best for you, you should try all of the options available. Now let's discuss some local area advertising options.

Google is going to offer two options.

The first is to run traditional Google Ads, potentially using their newer campaign type of Performance Max. The Google algorithm finds the best combination of headlines, images, videos, and service locations to bring you local customers using this type of dynamic ad campaign. Performance Max campaigns are used frequently by accounting, legal, dental, and medical professionals. Even localized stores use this campaign type.

Alternatively, if your business qualifies, Google offers a Local Service Ads option. The Google Local Service Ads offers a pay-per-lead model, which means you get charged a flat fee for each lead the platform provides you. Home service contractors, such as plumbers, electricians, roofers, and heating installers, frequently use Google Local Service Ads.

You can also target people in your local area using Facebook Ads. The first step is to set up a campaign with ad sets restricted to certain geographic areas. We often rely on local Facebook Ads for all types of heating/cooling companies.

2.) Social Media Marketing

Almost all online ads you see on social networks qualify as social ads.

It's important to keep the ad creatives fresh when running social ads. If you don't rotate out ad creatives every few weeks your campaign performance will slowly decrease. For higher spending ad campaigns, you might need to look at weekly ad creative tweaks.

The best part of social media advertising is you can target audiences that have never thought of your product or service, or perhaps just aren't thinking about it now. When running search engine advertising, that is quite the opposite since your ads are only going to show when someone is actively searching for what your heating/cooling company offers.

That benefit can also be a curse though, since conversion rates are often lower when people aren't closer in the revenue funnel of making an immediate purchase.

3.) Search Ads

If you know people are searching online for the products or services you offer, you'll want to invest in search advertisements.

There are some people out there who refer to this as hvac contractor Search Engine Marketing, or SEM for short. This is just a different way of explaining search ads, which are advertisements placed on the search results page of a search engine above the SEO placements.

If you've been running search advertising on Google for a while and have been successful at it, we suggest considering copying the campaigns over to the Bing Ads platform. As of an October 2022 study from StatCounter, about 3.57% of online users rely on Bing for their primary search engine.

4.) Display Ads

You'll find display ads on all kinds of message boards, chat rooms, game lounges, news websites (sometimes even nearby news stations), gossip websites, and more.

These are commonly used within the Google Ads and Bing Ads platforms.

To get started with display ads, you just need a set of ad creatives in different image sizes. It also helps to have a general idea of your target audience, but both ad platforms have their own algorithms that help you produce results from your ad spend.

5.) Retargeting Ads

Not everyone is going to convert during their first experience with your heating/cooling company website, landing page, or sales funnel.

It is almost always recommended to set up retargeting ads to help bring people back to your website after they've had time to think through different options.

You can run retargeting ads on any ad platform, too.

6.) Shopping Ads

This type of search ad was popularized by Google Shopping Campaigns.

To get started with Google Shopping, you just need an ecommerce website, a product feed (CSV or TXT), a Google Merchant Center account, and a Google Ads account for your heating/cooling company.

With these tools in place, you'll be able to provide Google Ads an updated list of all your accurate product data, including the title, SKU, image, price, and availability. From there, they will be able to find the right types of search queries to display your products at the top of the search results page.

7.) Video Ads

You can run video ads on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and other social networking websites.

If you are interested in running YouTube Ads, you'll just need to set up a video ads campaign in Google Ads.

To run video ads in Facebook or Instagram, you'll need a working Facebook Ads account.

Both ad platforms offer excellent conversion opportunities with video ads. We frequently use video ads to showcase product launches, custom services, personal introductions, and more!

If you have the budget to support ad creatives in video format, look to implement them into your paid advertising campaigns.