It is 9 p.m. on a January night and the furnace has quit. A homeowner types "furnace repair near me" and sees two ads. The first reads "HVAC Services - Your Comfort Experts." The second reads "Furnace Repair Tonight - No Heat? We Answer Now," and the click lands on a page about furnace repair, with the phone number at the top.
Both companies may have bid the same amount. Google will not treat them the same, and neither will the homeowner, for the same reason: one of these ads is about the furnace, and the other is about the company.
Below: how Google orders HVAC ads and prices the click, and why the fix that matters most is a boring one. One job per ad group, the homeowner's word for that job in the ad, and a page about that job behind it. Our examples come from the HVAC searches, ads and websites we studied in one example market, Indianapolis. The method applies wherever your trucks run.
The Highest Bid Doesn't Always Win the Top HVAC Ad. Google Weighs Five Other Things Too.
Google calls the score that sets an ad's position Ad Rank, and it publishes what goes into it. Retold for a furnace company, the six factors are:
- Your bid. The ceiling you set on a furnace click. What you actually pay is often lower.
- The quality of your ad and its landing page. Google judges how useful and relevant both are to the search, what the homeowner expects to find after clicking, and how easy the page is to use. A furnace ad that lands on a furnace page scores better here than a furnace ad that lands on a home page full of water heaters.
- Ad Rank thresholds. A quality floor. An ad below Google's minimum doesn't show, however much it bids.
- How competitive the auction is. When two ads are close, either can win the spot. When one is far ahead, it wins more often, and may pay more for the certainty.
- The context of the search. A "furnace repair" search at 2 a.m. from a phone in a cold house is a different auction from a noon laptop search for furnace prices. Location, device, timing and the rest of the results page all count.
- The expected effect of your assets. Call buttons, sitelinks and other extras that make the ad more useful.
Google does not publish an Ad Rank formula or a formula for what you pay per click, and we won't invent one. What matters is the list. Five of the six factors are not the bid, and the second one is almost entirely in your hands.
Rank matters for a plain reason: a homeowner with no heat taps one of the first ads and rarely scrolls to the fourth.
Quality Score Is a Reading, Not a Ruling. Google Says It Isn't an Input to the Auction.
Inside your account, each keyword carries a Quality Score from 1 to 10. Google calls it a diagnostic and says outright that it is not one of the inputs the auction uses. It summarizes how your ads and pages compare with other advertisers', so you know where to work. It does not set your price or your position by itself.
Three readings feed that number:
- Expected clickthrough rate: the odds your ad gets tapped when it shows for that keyword. Google measures it with position, assets and other ad formats factored out, so a bigger bid or more sitelinks won't raise it. What raises it is a headline that says what the homeowner typed.
- Ad relevance: a furnace search should meet a furnace ad, not a list of every service on the truck.
- Landing page experience: does the page behind the ad help the person who tapped it?
Each part shows as below average, average or above average. Read them like a tech reads a blink code on a furnace control board: they tell you where to look, not what to replace.
137 of the 336 HVAC Ads We Read Say "HVAC." Homeowners Mostly Type "AC" and "Furnace."
Here is the gap this chapter is named for. Across the US, "AC repair" draws about 368,000 searches a month and "HVAC repair" about 74,000, roughly five to one. "Furnace repair" draws about 201,000. In the 844 customer reviews we read, homeowners wrote "AC" 135 times and "HVAC" 100 times.
The ads speak a different dialect. We read 336 ads that HVAC contractors in our example market ran, pulled from Google's Ads Transparency Center. "HVAC" turns up in 137 of them, "AC" or "air conditioning" in 109. That's the trade's own vocabulary. "HVAC" belongs on the truck door, the license and the invoice. A homeowner whose upstairs bedroom just hit 84 degrees types "AC."
Ad relevance rewards the words the searcher used. A homeowner who typed "AC repair" and sees "AC Repair Today" in the headline knows in a second that the ad is about their problem. One who sees "Full-Service HVAC Solutions" has to translate first, and plenty won't bother.
A Furnace Repair Ad Group Holds Five or Six Ways to Say "Fix My Furnace." "HVAC Services" Holds Everything.
An ad group is a small set of keywords that share ads. It is also the easiest lever in this whole chapter, because ad relevance is mostly decided by how tight the group is. Keep about five or six keywords in a group, all of which mean the same job, and the ad written for that group will fit every one of them.
For an HVAC company, the first groups usually split by job and by season:
- AC repair: "AC repair near me," "air conditioning repair," "AC not cooling," "AC repair" plus your city.
- Furnace repair: "furnace repair near me," "furnace not working," "gas furnace repair," "furnace repair" plus your city.
- Heat pump repair: its own group, because it behaves like a heating search, not a cooling one. In the US it ran about 110,000 searches in January and 14,800 in June.
- AC replacement and furnace replacement: separate from repair, because the buyer, the page and the value are different (Chapter 3).
- Tune-ups and maintenance: a spring cooling group and a fall heating group.
Emergency and after-hours searches get their own campaign later, in Chapter 14.
Now picture the alternative: one ad group called "HVAC Services" with forty keywords, from "AC repair" to "duct cleaning" to "new furnace cost." Its ad has to say something true about all forty, so it says nothing specific about any of them.
Each group's ad should repeat its job word in at least one headline, in the homeowner's version of the word. "Furnace Repair Tonight" beats "Heating Solutions" for a furnace search every time.
Nine of 12 HVAC Sites We Checked Already Have an AC Repair Page and a Furnace Repair Page. Ads Should Land on Them.
Landing page experience is the third part of Quality Score, and the good news is that most HVAC companies have already built the pages. Of the twelve example sites we checked, nine link to a separate AC repair page and a separate furnace or heating repair page.
The question is whether the ads use them. Across the sample:
- One company's ads show only its home page address, so a furnace search lands on a page that has to serve every service it sells.
- On eight of the twelve, at least one path shown in an ad led to a page that no longer existed or redirected to the home page. Paths shown in an ad are partly display text and don't always match the final address, so this is a warning sign rather than proof, but it is worth ten minutes of checking.
A matching page continues the promise the ad made. If the ad said "Furnace Repair Tonight," the page should say furnace repair in its first heading, show the phone number before anything else, and answer the questions a cold homeowner asks: how soon, roughly what it costs to come out, and whether you work on their kind of furnace.
Look at the page the way the homeowner does. They want proof that you fix this kind of problem, a sense of how soon someone can come, and a reason to trust you with the house. Reviews that mention the same job help more than a general star rating. A photo of your own tech at a furnace helps more than a stock photo of a smiling family on a couch.
The same rule runs through every group. AC replacement ads land on a replacement page with options and financing. Tune-up ads land on the tune-up or plan page.
A Service Page That Loads Slowly on a Phone Loses the Homeowner Standing in a Hot Kitchen.
Most of these searches happen on a phone, often in a hot kitchen or a cold hallway. Before an ad points at a page, test the page in PageSpeed Insights, Google's free speed checker, with the mobile option selected. The tool flags what slows the page down, and the fixes are usually unexciting: oversized photos, a chat widget that loads before the phone number, a slider nobody scrolls.
Three checks matter more than any score:
- The phone number is visible and tappable without scrolling.
- The first heading names the job the ad was about.
- The page loads fast enough that the homeowner never wonders whether it worked.
Speed is one part of landing page experience, not the whole of it. A fast page about the wrong job still loses to a reasonable page about the right one.
Next: Keyword Planner Mixes Water Heaters, Drains and Furnaces Into One List.
Your ad groups now follow the jobs homeowners search for, and each one has a page to land on. Chapter 3 priced those jobs, Chapter 2 chose which searches to buy first, and Chapter 1 set up tracking. Chapter 5 fills the groups with real keywords from competitor sites and sorts out the plumbing that comes with them.
The full rollout, from tracking to seasonal budgets, maintenance plans and new-system ads, is on the guide's home page.
When we build HVAC accounts through our Google Ads management, no ad group goes live until it has a page about its own job. Doing it yourself? Run your top three keywords through Google's ad preview tool, which shows your ads without charging you for a click, and follow each one to the page it lands on.
