Boost your HVAC advertising ROI with these 3 tools

When a homeowner loses heat in the winter or cool air in the summer, the urgency drives them to pick up the phone. That’s why the success of many HVAC advertising campaigns is measured by how many calls they generate.

But HVAC advertising keeps getting more competitive. With the industry projected to grow by more than $10 billion by 2030 — and with no HVAC contractor holding more than 5% of the market — marketers have to be smart with their ad spend.

Thankfully, it’s never been easier to measure which HVAC advertising channels generate most of your calls and bring in the most valuable leads. So while your competitors go with their best guess, you’ll have the data to know which ad channels deliver your best ROI.

Source-level tracking finds your highest-ROI ad channels

Source-level tracking is a type of call tracking that adds unique phone numbers to your HVAC advertising campaigns. That lets you see how many calls come from each ad channel and which calls lead to your highest value deals. This includes calls made from both online and offline advertisements, such as your Google My Business listing and direct mail ads.

Each number forwards the call to your main business line. From there, metrics display on a dashboard that you can filter for deeper insights. For example, first-time calls give you an idea of what ads do well for building awareness. On the other hand, qualified calls give you a sense of which ad channels your ideal customers frequent.

Want to know how many calls come from your billboards and what they’re worth? Source-level call tracking makes that possible. (Source)

Now, you can run reports on your HVAC advertising campaigns to take the guesswork out of which channels drive your calls and what those calls are worth. Here are a few ways you can do this in CallRail:

1. [__Qualify and score call leads automatically.__](https://www.callrail.com/conversation-intelligence/) Reports will show lead quality by ad channel.
   

2. Tag call leads as closed-won or closed-lost. This lets you go deeper to see how leads convert to sales by channel.
3. Assign values to call leads to see which advertising channels bring in your most promising leads.

With those reports, you can make evidence-based decisions about which channels to invest more (or less) of your HVAC advertising budget in. You may find out your highest-performing channel receives the smallest spend. Or, you might see a chance to experiment with an underperforming channel, such as trying video ads on social. Strategic decisions like those will make it easier to forecast cash flow and manage reserves.

Automated responses close more sales from ad-generated calls

Say a customer sees your ad and calls, but you’re in the middle of replacing furnace ignitors. An automated response will keep your lead warm so you can follow up and book an appointment.

Fact is, 78% of callers go with the first service provider who responds to them. Not to mention, LiveVoice reports that 43% of HVAC companies don’t return calls at all, and the majority that do take more than 24 hours. That means quickly following up gives you an advantage over competitors.

Automated responses work via text. When you don’t pick up the phone, customers receive a text message that acknowledges you’ve heard the customer and will respond soon.

Prequalify calls from your ads so you can prioritize responses to your highest-value leads.

You can prequalify leads, too. Prioritize the most urgent and highest-value customers when you have to return multiple calls. Set up parameters for the calls you want to be notified about, such as first-time callers and customers who leave voice mails.

CallRail will then also send you an email summarizing the call. That way, you act on the call as quickly as possible without having your work interrupted.

Automation Rules prioritizes your HVAC advertising leads

Automation Rules detects words and phrases customers mention during calls that are relevant to your business. This helps you qualify and estimate lead value as calls happen. But that’s not all. Automation Rules also shows you the language customers use to describe their problems, setting you up to write better landing pages and paid ads.

To help qualify and estimate leads, Automation Rules listens for the key terms you define in CallRail as important. You might define “frozen” as important because it likely indicates a customer has a frozen AC line. Or you might prioritize “leak” because it could mean a customer’s furnace is leaking.

From there, you can assign actions to each keyword so it qualifies the call. Say a keyword like “ac rattling” indicates that a customer probably needs a new compressor. You can automatically tag the call with “$2,500” so you know it’s likely a high-value lead. Assigning keyword actions like this helps you quickly prioritize your lead follow-up.

But Automation Rules presents an arguably greater way to improve your HVAC advertising ROI. It shows you how customers describe their heating and cooling problems. You can use that language to write more relevant paid search ads on Google. The search engine will then reward you with higher ad positions and lower bid costs as you improve your ad quality score.

This graphic from WordStream shows how Google rewards the ad quality with higher rankings and lower costs.(Source)

As the graphic from WordStream shows, a high quality score can drop your ad cost by 75%, maybe more, depending on the quality of your competition. One of the best ways to improve your quality score is to make your ads and landing pages as relevant as possible to your customers’ searches. Automation Rules aligns your copy with your customers’ language, so you write better Google ads and improve your landing pages].

Boost your HVAC advertising ROI with CallRail’s tools

With source-level call tracking, automated ad responses, and Automation Rules, you can build measurable marketing campaigns that drive calls to your heating and cooling business. Even better, the more data you collect on where your calls come from, how much they’re worth and how much you spent to get them, the more you’ll be able to refine your ads to incrementally improve your ROI.