On an HVAC agency template, buying leads like everyone else on it

Being on a vertical agency template means being structurally identical to hundreds of other contractors — same page shapes, same content angles, same everything except the town names. Template parity is a real competitive problem in home services. When your site is architecturally indistinguishable from your competitors', the only remaining levers are auction discipline and differentiated offer. Filter delivery and generator installation are genuinely uncommon in this market and did not appear as campaign structures anywhere.

Audited September 2026: Blog, city landing pages, online scheduling, financing, service-area pages. The site is built by MTA360, an HVAC-vertical marketing agency — meaning the structure, the content patterns and the page architecture are shared with a large number of competing contractors on the same template.

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 $169 to $145 (-14%); Lead-to-booked-job rate from 39.1% to 44.0% (+5 pts); Cost per booked job from $432 to $330 (-24%); 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 Sound Heating & Air Conditioning'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.

Sound Heating & Air Conditioning 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.