How We Achieved 4.5x ROAS for a Long Island HVAC Company

When this Long Island HVAC company came to us, they were spending roughly $8,000 per month on Google Ads and generating an average of 22 leads. Their cost per lead was around $364, and their close rate on those leads was about 18% — meaning they were paying over $2,000 to acquire each new customer. For a business where the average installation ticket runs $5,500–$8,000, that margin was uncomfortably thin.

Twelve months later, the same $8,000 monthly budget was generating 94 leads at an average cost of $85 each, with a close rate that had climbed to 31%. Their return on ad spend — measuring revenue generated from ad-sourced customers against total ad spend — hit 4.5x. Here's exactly what we changed and why.

The Problem: One Campaign Trying to Do Everything

The original account structure was simple — almost too simple. There was essentially one campaign covering all HVAC services: air conditioning installation, heating installation, emergency AC repair, emergency heating repair, maintenance plans, and duct cleaning. All of these were grouped together with a single daily budget and a single set of bids.

The problem with this approach is that these are fundamentally different types of customers with different levels of urgency, different willingness to pay, and different conversion rates. Someone searching "emergency AC repair Long Island" is ready to spend money right now and will likely call the first business that answers. Someone searching "AC installation cost Long Island" is in research mode and may not decide for weeks.

Bundling them together meant the algorithm was optimizing for an average across wildly different intent signals — and the budget was being spread too thin to dominate any single category.

Step 1: Campaign Restructuring by Intent

The first thing we did was split the single campaign into four distinct campaigns, each with its own budget, bidding strategy, and ad creative:

• Emergency repair (AC and heat): High-urgency, highest CPC, highest close rate. These keywords ("emergency AC repair," "AC not working," "furnace stopped working") went into their own campaign with the largest slice of budget and call-optimized ads. Emergency service callers don't fill out forms — they call. We set this campaign to maximize phone calls.
• Installation intent: Keywords like "new AC installation," "central air installation cost," and "HVAC system replacement" indicate someone planning a large purchase. These got a separate campaign with longer-form ads, a focus on financing options, and a landing page built around the installation decision process.
• Maintenance and tune-ups: Lower urgency, lower ticket, but high lifetime value. Customers who sign up for annual maintenance plans tend to call the same company for repairs and installations. This campaign ran with a lower CPA target, optimized for form submissions rather than calls.
• Brand and competitor terms: A small campaign capturing searches for the company's name and competitive terms like "[competitor] HVAC Long Island," ensuring we were capturing bottom-funnel traffic that was already familiar with the category.

Step 2: Local Bidding Adjustments for Nassau and Suffolk

The company served all of Long Island, but their profit margins and call-to-close rates varied significantly by area. Their Nassau County leads closed at a higher rate (primarily because their technicians were based in Nassau and could arrive faster), while certain eastern Suffolk towns generated lower-quality leads that were harder to convert.

We used geographic bid adjustments to increase bids by 20–35% in the highest-performing zip codes in Nassau and western Suffolk, and reduced bids by 15–20% in areas where the data showed consistently lower conversion rates. This alone reduced wasted spend by an estimated 12% while increasing volume in the most profitable service areas.

Step 3: Building Dedicated Landing Pages

Before we took over, all ad traffic — regardless of what keyword triggered the ad — was being sent to the company's homepage. The homepage is a beautiful, comprehensive website. It is not a landing page.

We built four dedicated landing pages matching each campaign's intent:

• An emergency repair page that led with the phone number in massive type, featured "Same-Day Service Guaranteed" messaging, displayed 47 five-star Google reviews, and had the form fields reduced to just name and phone number
• An installation estimate page with a short quiz (3 questions) that helped visitors identify the right system size, followed by a form requesting a free in-home estimate
• A maintenance plan page with a clear offer ($149 tune-up with free filter replacement) and a simple booking calendar
• A general services page for brand/competitor traffic

The emergency repair landing page alone saw a conversion rate of 31% — compared to the 7% rate when traffic was going to the homepage. For the installation campaign, the estimate-request page converted at 18%, up from 6%.

Step 4: Ad Copy That Matched Searcher Intent

We rewrote every ad in the account to directly mirror what each keyword group was signaling. For emergency searches, the ads led with response time ("Long Island's Fastest Emergency HVAC — 90-Minute Response") and availability ("24/7, Including Weekends"). For installation searches, the ads emphasized financing ("0% Financing Available — New AC Systems from $89/month") and the free estimate offer.

We also A/B tested two to three ad variants per ad group, rotating them until we had statistical significance on which headlines, descriptions, and calls to action performed best. Over 90 days, this systematic creative testing improved click-through rate by an average of 40% across all campaigns — which, in turn, improved Quality Scores and reduced the cost per click.

Step 5: Negative Keyword Discipline

One area that surprised the client: we identified and excluded over 200 search terms that were triggering their ads but would never produce a qualified lead. These included things like "HVAC jobs Long Island" (job seekers), "HVAC school" (students), "how to fix AC yourself" (DIYers), and dozens of competitor names paired with "reviews" (people researching competitors, not ready to hire).

Eliminating this wasted impressions and spend freed up roughly 15% of the total budget — budget that was immediately reinvested into the highest-performing keywords and campaigns.

The Results After 12 Months

• Monthly leads: 22 → 94 (+327%)
• Cost per lead: $364 → $85 (–77%)
• Lead-to-close rate: 18% → 31%
• New customers per month: 4 → 29
• Return on ad spend: 1.1x → 4.5x
• Ad spend: unchanged at $8,000/month

The same budget. The same service area. The same team. The difference was entirely in how the account was structured, how the budget was allocated, and what happened when someone clicked.

What This Means for Your Business

If you're running Google Ads right now and the results feel disappointing, the issue is rarely the budget. In our experience, the vast majority of underperforming accounts suffer from the same set of structural problems: campaigns that aren't segmented by intent, bids that aren't adjusted for geography or time, traffic going to the wrong landing page, and ad copy that isn't speaking directly to what the searcher actually wants.

All of these are fixable. And the improvement when you fix them isn't marginal — it's transformative.