It's a July evening. The upstairs bedroom reads 84 degrees, the vents are pushing air that feels like a hair dryer, and a homeowner is standing in the hallway with a phone. They don't type "ac repair." They type "ac blowing warm air," a search Americans run about 9,900 times a month.
An HVAC account built the way this guide recommends, on exact match, won't show an ad for that search at first. That's correct. A new account should spend its first dollars on the searches it can predict and price. But the homeowner in the hallway is a real repair call, and a well-run account reaches them in its second stage.
Here is how an HVAC account moves from the searches you can list to the far larger number you can't, and what has to be true before it does.
Exact Match Holds the HVAC Searches You Can Predict. Buy Those Before You Buy Guesses.
We build new accounts from the inside out. The inside is a campaign we call Isolation: exact match keywords on the searches everyone in the trade knows, with bids you set yourself for each ad group.
These searches carry the volume. Across the US, homeowners type "ac repair" roughly 368,000 times a month and "furnace repair" roughly 201,000. In the Indianapolis area we use as this guide's example market, each draws about 4,400. A search like that is a homeowner telling you exactly what they want, in the words of the job ad groups from Chapter 4.
Exact match keeps those ad groups honest. Google's matching rules put an exact match keyword first in line when the homeowner's search is the same as the keyword, word for word. Your furnace repair ad shows for furnace repair, your spend goes where you planned it, and every booked job in the first months comes from a search you chose on purpose.
Isolation launches in month one, alongside a small campaign for your own company name. It runs with the negative list from Chapter 5 already in place. What it gives up is reach. What it buys is clean data: a real cost per booked AC repair and a real cost per booked furnace repair, in your market, from your own account.
Six Symptom Searches Opened 5,380 Wordings in Keyword Planner. Half Draw 10 Searches a Month or Fewer.
Now look at the outside: the searches nobody puts on a keyword list.
Homeowners describe what they feel, hear and see before they know what's broken. We gave Keyword Planner six of those searches: "ac blowing warm air," "furnace blowing cold air," "ac not cooling," "furnace not turning on," "heat pump blowing cold air" and "ac leaking water." It came back with 6,642 related ideas across the US, and 5,380 of them were more ways of describing a symptom.
A few of those wordings are big. "Ac not blowing cold air" alone draws about 14,800 searches a month. But most are tiny:
- 238 wordings draw 1,000 or more searches a month.
- 4,324 draw between 10 and 90.
- The median wording draws 10.
Bring it down to one market and it gets thinner still. In the Indianapolis area, each of the six seed searches runs 50 to 70 a month. "Ac repair" runs 4,400.
Homeowners write the same way when they review the company that came out. In the 844 Indianapolis HVAC reviews we read, "won't cool," "not cooling" or "warm air" came up 10 times, an upstairs or second floor that wouldn't cool 6 times, and a frozen unit 3 times. People remember the symptom that made them call.
No one can build ad groups for 5,380 wordings that each show up a handful of times a month in a single city. That isn't a keyword problem. It's the job broad match was built for.
"AC Blowing Warm Air" Tops Out Near $39 at the Top of the Page. "AC Repair" Tops Out Near $100.
The symptom searches also come cheaper. Keyword Planner's top-of-page bid ranges, nationally, from what advertisers have paid in past auctions:
- "Ac repair": $16.09 to $100.00.
- "Furnace repair": $10.55 to $68.76.
- "Ac blowing warm air": $3.77 to $39.00.
- "Ac not blowing cold air": $2.31 to $42.10.
- "Furnace not turning on": $7.07 to $52.20.
- "Ac leaking water": $2.89 to $44.37.
Part of the gap is competition. Every HVAC company in town bids on "ac repair," and far fewer chase every way a homeowner can say the air feels wrong.
Part of it is honest, too. Some people searching "furnace not turning on" are about to check the breaker, flip the switch on the side of the unit, or swap a filter, and they'll never call anyone. Keyword Planner listed about 70 troubleshooting and how-to wordings ("ac not cooling troubleshooting," "cause of ac not cooling") among the 5,380. A symptom search is a mix of people who'll call and people who'll fix it themselves.
Sorting the callers from the fixers by hand, wording by wording, is impossible at this scale. That's what the bidding in the next stage is for: it pays more for the searches that have turned into booked jobs and less for the ones that haven't.
Broad Match Learns Fastest From Keywords That Already Book Furnace and AC Jobs. Seed It With Three to Five of Them.
The second stage is a campaign we call Exploration. It starts as a copy of Isolation with three changes.
First, it carries only three to five keywords: the ones that have already booked real jobs in Isolation. If "ac repair" and "furnace repair near me" bring in paid work, those are the seeds.
Second, those keywords run on broad match. Google describes broad match as reaching related searches beyond what exact and phrase match would catch, and that's how "ac repair" can lead to "ac blowing warm air" and the thousands of wordings around it.
Third, the bidding changes. Google's own broad match guide says pairing it with Smart Bidding is critical: no two searches are alike, so the bid on each one should come from the signals present in that auction. We use Target CPA (Google began renaming "Maximize conversions with a Target CPA" to plain "Target CPA" in June 2026). You set the average cost per conversion you're willing to pay, and Google aims for it. Some conversions will cost more and some less; the target is an average, not a cap.
Set that target from Isolation's real numbers, not a wish. Say Isolation books furnace and AC repair jobs at about $150 each. Then $150 is where Exploration's target begins. Without that guardrail, broad match will find you plenty of searches. It just won't care what they cost.
Broad match on Target CPA takes one to two months to settle. Expect lumpy weeks, like the first cold snap after a mild fall.
Once Exploration carries the account, Isolation doesn't have to run at full strength. It can be paused, and switched back on later when you want your ad at the top for a specific search again, such as "furnace repair" during a January cold snap.
Broad Match Waits for About 30 Booked Jobs a Month, Not for a Date on the Calendar.
Exploration opens when the account is ready, not when the calendar says so. The gate is volume: about 30 quality conversions a month. For most HVAC accounts that lands around months two or three. A busy company spending more gets there sooner.
The word "quality" carries the weight of this whole stage. Target CPA learns from whatever you count as a conversion. If every ring of the phone counts, including the supply house, the warranty question and the robocall, broad match will go find more of those, cheaply and enthusiastically. If booked jobs count, it learns to find people who book. That's why Chapter 1 set up tracking around the paid job, not the call.
Below about 30 a month, in our experience, the system has too little to learn from, and broad match spends while it guesses. Stay in Isolation, fill the ad groups, and let the booked jobs pile up.
Further out still is AI Max for Search campaigns. In our rollout it's the final step (Chapter 13), added only after broad match has been running well, never straight onto an exact-match account.
Broad Match Also Finds "HVAC Jobs" and "How to Recharge AC." The Search Terms Report Catches Them.
Broad match reaches for related searches, and related cuts both ways. Alongside "ac blowing warm air," it can also reach "hvac jobs near me," "how to recharge ac," "used furnace for sale" and the name of the company across town.
The search terms report lists the real searches your ads appeared on. Make it the first screen you open each morning for Exploration's first 30 days, before the trucks roll. Add the job seekers, the do-it-yourselfers and the rival company names to the negative list from Chapter 5. After the first month, in our experience, a weekly read usually holds it.
There's a limit worth knowing. Google leaves some low-volume searches out of the report for privacy reasons, and in a long tail where the median wording draws 10 searches a month, that's a meaningful slice. You won't see every search you paid for. Judge Exploration by what it books and what each booked job costs, and use the report to catch the patterns that are visible.
Next: Manual Bids Hold the Top Spot on "Furnace Repair." Target CPA Takes Over When Broad Match Starts.
Your account now runs from the inside out: exact match on the searches you can name, and broad match reaching the symptom wordings once the account books enough jobs to steer it. Chapter 5 built the keyword list and negatives, Chapter 4 the ad groups, Chapter 3 the job values, Chapter 2 the order to buy searches in, and Chapter 1 the tracking. Chapter 7 covers bidding in each stage: what to watch in Isolation, and how to set and adjust Target CPA in Exploration.
The full rollout, from tracking to seasonal budgets, maintenance plans and new-system ads, is on the guide's home page.
For HVAC companies on our Google Ads management, symptom searches come in through broad match only after exact match has proven it can book furnace and AC jobs at a known cost. Running your own? Pull last month's booked repair calls and ask each customer what they typed or said first. Count the symptoms against the service names.
