A homeowner in our Indianapolis review sample signed up for a maintenance plan and booked the first tune-up. The tech came, did the visit, and left behind a list of suggested add-ons worth nearly $4,000, including an electronic air cleaner and duct cleaning, for a house less than three years old.
That review isn't unusual. It's the most common shape of the most common complaint we found about HVAC companies. And it starts long before the tech rings the bell, with an ad and a plan page that promise "two tune-ups a year" and never say what a tune-up is.
This chapter covers the plan as its own service line in Google Ads: what homeowners say goes wrong, what the ad and the page should say instead, how to keep paying members out of your new-customer campaigns, and the rules that apply when the plan renews on its own.
A Third of the Plan Complaints We Read Say the Tune-Up Turned Into a Sales Call.
When we read the 221 low-star Google reviews about heating and cooling jobs in our sample, 51 of them carried a complaint about a maintenance plan or membership. We went back through all 51 and sorted them by what actually went wrong. Some reviews fit more than one group, and 10 are mostly about a repair price or a diagnosis, with the plan in the background:
- The visit became a sales call: 17. A tune-up that ended in a replacement quote, a plan signed under pressure, a technician who "was more concerned in selling us parts" than cleaning.
- The maintenance wasn't done, or was done badly: 16. Filters never changed, the wrong refrigerant added, an outdoor unit left dirty, a 20-to-30-minute inspection, a system not put back together.
- The perks didn't show up: 6. "Priority service" that meant a four-day wait, a monthly service contract and a visit charge anyway.
- Couldn't cancel, still billed, no refund: 5.
- The plan sold as a condition of a warranty: 4.
Notice what's missing. Almost nobody complains about the price of the plan. Thirty of the 51 are about the visit itself: what happened during it, or what didn't.
The same reviews show the other side. Nineteen four- and five-star reviews mention a plan, and some of them are warm about it: one called it the best money you can spend, another praised a tech who explained the yearly plan with "no hard sell." Homeowners like these plans when the visit is a maintenance visit.
Eight of 12 HVAC Plan Pages Count the Visits but Never Say What Happens During One.
Every one of the 12 HVAC company websites behind this guide sells a plan. We read each plan page in full. Four name what a technician does at the visit. The other eight describe it in a phrase, "two precision tune-ups," "two seasonal precision calibrations," a "21 Point Winter Service," and stop there.
Homeowners go looking for the part those pages leave out. Keyword Planner shows the demand. US homeowners type "hvac maintenance checklist" roughly 1,600 times a month, nearly double the 880 for "hvac service agreement." They want the list before they want the contract.
The two most complete pages in our sample show what that looks like. Between them they list:
- Furnace: heat exchanger inspection, burners removed and cleaned, igniter and flame sensor checked, gas pressure and gas valve verified, flue checked for proper draft, a carbon monoxide scan.
- AC: condenser and evaporator coils cleaned, refrigerant charge checked, capacitor and contactors tested, condensate drain cleared, temperature split measured.
- Both: thermostat tested in every mode, electrical connections checked, the filter changed.
One of those pages goes a step further and marks the limits: removing and cleaning the blower costs extra, so do severely dirty coils, and the filter change covers standard one-inch filters only. That's the line that heads off a surprise bill before the visit, not after it.
A checklist like that does two jobs. It sells the plan on the work, which is what happy members praise. And it sets the standard for the visit, which is what unhappy members say was missing. When the page says "flame sensor checked" and the homeowner can see the tech did it, a lot of those 16 complaints never get written.
A Homeowner Shouldn't Have to Book a Tune-Up to Learn What It Covers. A Structured Snippet Says It in the Ad.
Most plan ads stop where the plan pages stop: a monthly price and a visit count. Google gives you three places under a search ad to say more.
Structured snippets. These show a header and a list of values under the ad. Google offers a fixed set of headers; "Service catalog" and "Types" fit an HVAC plan. Google asks for at least three values per header and recommends four or more, and the values have to match the header, which Google calls the most likely reason snippets get disapproved. For a plan, the values are the visit's tasks: "Heat exchanger check," "Coil cleaning," "Refrigerant check," "Flame sensor check." Short, concrete, and checkable after the visit.
Price assets. Google's price asset has a type called service tiers, built for plans that come in levels. Each card carries a header, a price and a description, with the header and description up to 25 characters each, and Google asks for at least three cards and can show up to eight. For an HVAC plan, the header is the tier, the price is the monthly fee, and the description says what that tier adds: "2 visits, 15% off repairs." Three tiers, three cards, no guessing.
A sitelink to the checklist. Sitelinks send people to specific pages. One of them should go straight to the full visit checklist, so the homeowner who wants every line can read it before calling.
The headlines carry the rest. Chapter 8 built headlines from your own reviews, and plan reviews are some of the best material you have: what members say they got, in their words. One phrase to use carefully: "no sales pitch." Only one of the 12 plan pages we read made any promise about sales pressure ("no pressure, no upsell"). If your techs are paid to sell add-ons at the tune-up, don't promise the homeowner they won't. That's how a headline becomes a one-star review.
Members Already Pay You Every Month. Keep Them Out of the Campaign Built to Find New Customers.
A plan member with a dead AC in July searches your name, or "ac repair near me," and clicks your ad. You just paid for a call that was coming to you anyway. A plan with a few thousand members can quietly eat a real share of a repair campaign that way, and the report counts each one as a booked job the ad found.
Google has a setting for this. Its customer acquisition goal can run in New Customer Only mode, which bids only for people who aren't already customers. Google recommends that mode for advertisers with strict acquisition budgets or lead-generation goals, and it works with Target CPA, the bid strategy this guide pairs with broad match in the Exploration stage (Chapter 6). Google also says to run a separate campaign for existing customers when you use it.
The setting needs to know who your customers are, and you tell it two ways: a customer list and the website tag. For an HVAC company, the member list is the obvious list to upload. Google drops a person from a Customer Match list 540 days after they were added or last updated, and a list stays usable only if 100 or more people are added or refreshed inside that span. A member list that's synced from your field-service software every month stays current on its own; one uploaded once and forgotten slowly empties out.
Then count the plan as its own result. Chapter 1 set the plan sign-up up as a separate action with its own value, and Chapter 3 showed why a member is worth more than one visit's fee. Keep it that way. A plan sold at the end of a tune-up that a $49 ad bought is the reason that ad pays. Fold the two together and you can't tell which ad did it.
An Auto-Renewing Plan Sold Online Has to Show Its Terms Before It Takes a Card Number.
Most HVAC plans renew on their own. That's the business model, and it's fine. But the moment a homeowner can sign up online and get charged every month, federal law has a say.
The Restore Online Shoppers' Confidence Act covers subscriptions sold online with automatic charges. Before it can charge anyone, a company has to clearly disclose all the material terms of the deal before collecting billing information, get the customer's express informed consent before charging, and provide a simple way to stop the recurring charges. Google's own Misrepresentation policy points the same way: it doesn't allow pricing practices that give a false or misleading impression of cost and lead to unexpected charges.
For a maintenance plan, the material terms are not mysterious: the monthly or yearly price, how long the commitment runs, whether it renews automatically, and how to cancel. Only one of the 12 plan pages we read stated its renewal terms (a 12-month minimum, renewing automatically after that). One other company printed its terms only in a downloadable brochure, including a cancellation penalty equal to the rest of the term.
That gap shows up in the reviews. Five of the 51 plan complaints are about canceling, billing after canceling, or a refund that never came. Four more are about warranties: a plan sold as "required" to keep an equipment warranty, or a homeowner who learned what the warranty covered only after paying. If the manufacturer's warranty does require regular maintenance, say exactly that, and say what the plan includes that meets it. "Join or lose your warranty" is not the same promise, and homeowners can tell the difference.
None of this is legal advice, and state laws on automatic renewals vary. Have your own attorney check your sign-up flow. But the ad version of the rule is simple: if the ad sells a plan, the page it lands on shows the price, the term, the renewal and the way out, before the card number.
Next: A $20,000 Replacement Quote Became a $1,300 Visit Elsewhere. New-System Ads Have to Show Why Replacing Wins.
Your plan now sells on the work: an ad and a page that say what each visit includes, tiers that say what each level adds, members kept out of the campaigns built to find new customers, and terms shown before anyone is billed. Chapter 14 split heating and cooling budgets, Chapter 13 added AI Max, Chapter 12 Local Services and Maps, Chapter 11 Demand Gen, Chapter 10 Performance Max, Chapter 9 the launch settings, Chapter 8 the ads, Chapter 7 the bids, Chapter 6 the two Search stages, Chapter 5 the keywords, Chapter 4 the ad groups, Chapter 3 the job values, Chapter 2 the order to buy searches in, and Chapter 1 the tracking. Chapter 16 covers new-system ads.
The full rollout, from tracking to seasonal budgets, maintenance plans and new-system ads, is on the guide's home page.
When we run HVAC accounts through our Google Ads management, the plan gets its own ads and its own conversion, the member list is synced and used as the existing-customer list once the account moves to Target CPA, and the landing page lists every task the visit includes. Running your own? Read your plan page as a stranger would and count the tasks it names. If the answer is zero, that's the first thing to fix.
