48 years, 400-unit high-rise installs, six Google reviews

A serious commercial HVAC contractor was carrying a review footprint that actively undermined it, in a market where 47% of buyers won't engage a business with fewer than 20 reviews. Six reviews is worse than none — it reads as either new or avoided. The commercial capability is real and rare, and every paid click was landing against a trust signal that contradicted it. This was a review and profile problem masquerading as a paid performance problem.

Audited September 2026: Blog, city landing pages including per-market service pages, WordPress with WP Rocket. No online booking, no financing, free-quote CTA only. Google Business Profile shows 4.3 stars across six reviews — for a 48-year-old company, effectively an unclaimed profile.

Days 0–14: Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent and line. Split branded and non-branded into separate campaigns so a $34 branded CPL stops flattering the $149 non-branded number. Rebuilt the negative keyword list from a search-terms audit — 25% of Google Ads accounts have never added a single negative, and accounts that use them convert at 13.0% against 4.6%.

Days 0–14 — Audit, conversion tracking rebuilt, negative keyword purge, campaign restructure by intent and line. Days 15–45 — Landing pages shipped, Local Services Ads or quote path live, call tracking and missed-call recovery in place. Days 46–90 — Budget reallocated on booked-job data rather than lead data; bid strategy set against seasonality.

The programme was run against four targets: Non-branded cost per lead from $227 to $177 (-22%); Lead-to-booked-job rate from 35.3% to 43.1% (+8 pts); Cost per booked job from $643 to $411 (-36%); Share of spend on non-converting search terms from 34% to 11% (-23 pts). These are the targets the work was set and measured against, derived from the published category benchmarks cited on this page — not figures reported back from Interstate Air Conditioning & Heating's systems. Measured results replace them here as reporting is reconciled.

No, and any agency that guarantees a number is selling you something. Every benchmark on this page is published by a named third party with a live source link, and every figure we report is reconcilable against the raw exports listed under proof — the ad platform change history, the call recordings, and the client-side booking or policy export. That is the standard we hold ourselves to, and it is the standard you should hold any agency to.

Interstate Air Conditioning & Heating runs at the Authority tier — $5,000/mo, covering PPC. Tier is set by the number of markets, the number of service lines and the reporting cadence, not by hours. Scope is agreed before anything is committed.