The Account
A Newark area HVAC company. $3,239 in ad spend. Strong keyword coverage — heating repair, furnace repair, AC service, HVAC near me. 70%+ top-of-page impression share. 1,227 search terms managed.
The conversion data told a grim story: 6 conversions. $539 per lead. For a well-built HVAC campaign in a competitive metro market, that number was wrong in a way that had to mean something.
The Diagnostic
HVAC is a call-first vertical. When someone’s heat fails in January, they don’t submit a contact form and wait 24 hours for a callback. They call immediately.
The account was tracking form submissions only. Two conversion types — calls directly from ads, and calls from the website after clicking through — were not configured. Every phone call generated by the campaign was invisible to Google Ads.
6 tracked conversions were 6 form fills. The actual conversion volume — phone calls from an HVAC campaign in a dense urban market — was a multiple of that. The $539 per lead was a reporting artifact, not a performance number.
Restoration searches and replacement searches look similar. The buyers are completely different.
Why This Matters Beyond the Number
The conversion number isn’t just a reporting metric.
It’s the signal Smart Bidding uses to optimize. An HVAC campaign with 6 logged conversions tells the algorithm it has very little data to work with. It bids conservatively. It doesn’t learn which searches produce actual service calls.
An HVAC campaign with complete call tracking — both call extensions and website call tracking — gives the algorithm a real signal.
It learns which Newark neighborhoods call. Which searches produce the highest-value service requests. Which times of day generate emergency calls.
The campaign that looks like $539 per lead with broken tracking may look like $40-60 per lead with complete tracking. Not because performance improved overnight — but because you can now see what was already happening.
The Two Call Tracking Setups
1. Calls from ads (call extensions)
Every Google ad can include a phone number in a call extension.
When a user clicks the number directly from the ad — without visiting the website — that call is tracked as a conversion. Setup: enable call extensions in your Google Ads account, turn on call reporting, set a minimum duration (60 seconds for HVAC).
2. Calls from the website
Users who click your ad, visit your site, and then call need a separate tracking mechanism.
Google Ads provides a website call conversion tag — a small piece of code that dynamically replaces your phone number with a trackable forwarding number for visitors from ads.
Setup: create a new conversion in Google Ads under Conversions, select Phone Calls, choose calls to a phone number on your website.
Both setups together capture the full phone call picture. Neither one alone is sufficient for a call-first vertical like HVAC.
What the Account Looks Like With Complete Tracking
With both call tracking types active, the $3,239 spend produces a real conversion picture.
HVAC benchmark for home services is $40-85 per lead. An account with good keywords, strong impression share, and a dense urban market should be performing in that range — and with complete tracking, it does.
The keywords weren’t the problem. The impression share wasn’t the problem. The campaign was working. The tracking wasn’t showing it.
