Every HVAC company runs two businesses a year. One answers "ac repair" in July, when the phones don't stop. The other answers "furnace repair" in January, when a dead furnace is an emergency. They share trucks, techs and a phone number. In Google Ads, they shouldn't share a budget.
The reason is simple and easy to miss. Google sets your budget per campaign. Put heating and cooling in one campaign and they compete for one daily number all year, including the months when both are running. This chapter shows how far apart the two seasons really are, why one campaign can't follow them, and how to move money ahead of the weather instead of behind it.
"AC Repair" Searches Quadruple From December to July. Furnace Demand Swings Sevenfold the Other Way.
Keyword Planner's monthly counts for the US show the shape of an HVAC year clearly:
- "Ac repair" bottoms out at about 165,000 searches in December and peaks at about 673,000 in July, roughly four times as many.
- "Furnace repair" bottoms out at about 60,500 in June and peaks at about 450,000 in January, more than seven times as many.
The peaks sit six months apart. Heat pumps follow the heating curve, not the cooling one: "heat pump repair" draws about 110,000 searches in January and 14,800 in June, which is why Chapter 4 gave it its own ad group.
Now look at the trade's own word. "Hvac near me" barely moves, between about 165,000 and 201,000 searches every month of the year. A company that builds its account around "hvac" sees a flat line and never notices that the jobs underneath it are swinging four- and seven-fold in opposite directions.
The tune-up searches tell the same story with a twist. "Furnace tune up" jumps from about 8,100 searches in September to about 33,100 in October, right before the first cold snap. "Ac tune up" climbs from about 14,800 in March to about 27,100 in July, which means plenty of homeowners don't think about a tune-up until the AC is already working hard.
Google Sets the Budget Per Campaign. Put Heating and Cooling Together and They Fight Over One Number.
Google ties the average daily budget to a single campaign: it's what you're willing to spend on an average day in that campaign. The furnace ad group and the AC ad group inside it take from the same daily figure.
That's fine for a campaign whose jobs rise and fall together. It's a problem when they don't. Put AC repair, furnace repair, tune-ups and heat pumps in one campaign and, in October, they all draw from the same pot. Whichever searches are cheapest or most plentiful that week take the money. If cheap AC tune-up clicks show up first in the morning, the furnace repair ads can run out of budget by afternoon, on exactly the days the furnace calls are worth the most.
October shows the problem best. In the same US data, "ac repair" still draws about 368,000 searches in October while "furnace repair" has already climbed to about 301,000. Both seasons are near full strength at once. A single campaign has to split one number between two busy businesses in the very month you most need to control the split.
You can change one campaign's budget every month, and some owners do. But you still can't tell it to spend more on heating and less on cooling at the same time, and you can't see what each season is actually costing you, because the report blends them.
The fix is two campaigns, heating and cooling, each built from the job ad groups in Chapter 4: furnace repair, heat pump repair, furnace replacement and fall tune-ups in one; AC repair, AC replacement and spring tune-ups in the other. Each gets its own budget, its own bids from Chapter 7 and its own report. In October you can raise heating without starving cooling, and in May the reverse.
Seasonality Adjustments Are Built for a Three-Day Sale, Not a Four-Month Heating Season.
Google Ads has a feature with a promising name: seasonality adjustments. It doesn't do what the name suggests for an HVAC company.
Google describes seasonality adjustments as an advanced tool for telling Smart Bidding about expected changes in conversion rates for future events like promotions or sales. It says to use them only if you expect major changes, because Smart Bidding already manages seasonal events. And its help page pitches them for events lasting a few days to a week, warning that they may work less well once stretched past two weeks.
A heating season runs four or five months. That's not a short event. It's half the business. For an HVAC account, seasonality is a budget question and a campaign-structure question, not a setting to toggle. The adjustment has a narrow use: a three-day flash promotion, or a sudden heat wave you know is coming, in a campaign that already bids with Smart Bidding.
A Shared Budget Blends Two Seasons Into One Bill. Keep Them Separate Until You Know Each One's Cost.
There's another tool worth knowing about. A shared budget lets several campaigns draw from one pool: Google describes it as letting underused budget flow automatically to campaigns that are limited by budget. Google even lists seasonal campaigns among the cases where a shared budget can help.
So why not just share? Because the first job of a heating campaign and a cooling campaign is to tell you what each season costs. A shared pool smooths that over: if the cooling campaign borrows heating's unspent money every day in July, you never learn what cooling costs on its own budget.
Start with separate budgets. Run a full year, or at least one heating and one cooling season, and learn the cost per booked job for each from Chapter 1's tracking. What you're looking for is the comparison a blended report hides. A booked furnace repair in January and a booked AC repair in July can cost very different amounts, because the competition, the search volume and the urgency all differ. If heating jobs come in at half the cost of cooling jobs, that's a reason to lean harder into heating in the fall and hold cooling to the jobs that pay. You can only make that call with two sets of numbers.
Once you know those numbers, a shared budget can be a reasonable way to let the busier season borrow from the quieter one. By then you'll know whether the borrowing is paying off.
October and May Decide Who Gets the First Calls. Move the Budget Before the Weather Turns.
The monthly data shows where the turns happen. "Furnace repair" jumps from about 110,000 searches in September to about 301,000 in October. "Ac repair" jumps from about 246,000 in April to about 450,000 in May. Those are the months when demand roughly doubles or triples in four weeks.
Budget that moves after the first cold snap is late. The first homeowners with a cold house tend to call whoever shows up first, and the companies with budget already in place are the ones showing up. A simple calendar for a two-campaign account:
- Late September to early October: raise the heating budget ahead of the first cold night. Start fall furnace tune-up ads; the searches peak in October.
- November to February: heating at full budget; cooling at a low maintenance level for the repair calls that still come in.
- March and April: start spring AC tune-up ads while searches are climbing; keep heating steady for late cold snaps.
- Late April to early May: raise the cooling budget ahead of the first hot week, and ease heating down.
- June to August: cooling at full budget, heating low.
Here's the shape of it with made-up numbers. Say the account can spend about $4,000 a month. In July, that might be about $110 a day on cooling and $20 on heating: $130 a day, times 30.4, is close to $4,000. In January, flip it: about $100 on heating and $30 on cooling. In October, split it closer to even. The monthly total barely moves; where it goes changes completely. That's only possible when each season has its own campaign and its own daily number.
The budget isn't the only thing that follows the season. Each campaign's ads should sound like its season: "Furnace Quit? Same-Night Service" belongs in the heating campaign in January, "AC Blowing Warm? Same-Day Repair" in the cooling campaign in July, both written from your reviews the way Chapter 8 described. And the Demand Gen campaigns from Chapter 11 should start a few weeks before each turn, while homeowners are still researching.
Two cautions. First, the first hot or cold day of a season is exactly when Google's overdelivery rule from Chapter 9 lets a campaign spend up to twice its daily budget; set the budget knowing that can happen. Second, replacement searches keep their own calendar. In the same data, "ac replacement" is highest in September and October, about 27,100 a month, after a summer of repairs. Chapter 16 covers new-system ads.
Your own market sets the exact dates. In Indianapolis the first cold night comes earlier than in Atlanta. Use your call logs from last year: the week the furnace calls started is the week before the budget should have moved.
Next: Homeowners Complain About Maintenance Plans That Turn Into Sales Pitches. Advertise What Each Visit Includes.
Your account now follows the weather: a heating campaign and a cooling campaign with their own budgets, moved ahead of each season's turn, judged on what each season actually costs. 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 15 covers maintenance plans.
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, heating and cooling launch as separate campaigns, and the budget calendar is set from the company's own call history before the first season turns. Running your own? Pull last year's calls by week and circle the first week each season's calls doubled. That's your budget date for this year, minus seven days.
