How to Get HVAC Leads All Year, Not Just in the Spike

Where HVAC leads come from, what they cost in Ontario, and how to spend across a season that swings from January panic to April silence.

By Gavin Sevastian · Updated August 4, 2026 · 16 min read

Most advice on how to get HVAC leads is written as though demand is steady. It isn't. Your phone volume is set by the weather, and the weather doesn't care what month your budget says. This page covers where HVAC leads come from, what they cost in Ontario dollars, and how to spend across a year that swings from January panic to April silence.

Start here: the four things that move HVAC lead flow fastest

Four things that cost the least and matter the most, all of which you can start this week.

1. 1

   Fix what happens when the phone rings before you buy another click

   Answer rate, after-hours coverage and callback speed decide what your advertising is worth. A call that hits voicemail during a heat wave is demand you already paid for and then threw away.

2. 2

   Point each service at its own page, not at your homepage

   Someone who clicked an ad about AC repair should land on a page about AC repair in their area. Sending that click to a general homepage loses conversions, and it loses them quietly.

3. 3

   Start asking every completed job for a review, today

   Reviews are a seasonal asset. Peak season is when the completed jobs exist, and the reviews you collect now are what buy visibility in the next peak.

4. 4

   Separate emergency work from planned purchases

   No heat at 11pm and a full system replacement are two different businesses sharing one phone number.

The first one is not an operations detail dressed up as marketing. On Local Services Ads, responsiveness is an explicit input into who gets shown: Google's documentation on ad rankings notes that "missed calls may negatively affect your responsiveness." So a missed call costs you the job and then costs you visibility on the next one. If your ads are running and the phone still feels quiet, start with why your Google Ads are not getting calls before you touch a budget. (Google Local Services Help, About ad rankings)

The second is the cheapest conversion improvement available to most contractors, and it is almost always a build problem rather than an advertising problem. If your ads run to a homepage, every visitor has to work out for themselves whether you do what they need, in the town they live in, at the hour they are asking. Some of them will. Most of them will go back to the results page and click somebody who answered the question in the first line. One page per service, with the service area named on it, is not a sophisticated technique. It is the baseline everything else is measured against, and seasonal pages need to be built and swapped ahead of the season rather than during it.

The third one has an awkward property: it pays off later, so it never feels urgent. Review volume is only available when you are completing jobs, which means the busiest weeks of your year are the only weeks you can build it, and the busiest weeks are also the ones where nobody has the attention to ask. Whatever system you use, it has to be one that survives a heat wave. A line on the invoice, a text from the office at end of day, a card in the truck. If asking depends on somebody remembering to ask, it will not happen in July, and July is where the volume is.

The fourth is the one everything else on this page depends on. Once you stop treating emergency work and planned replacement as one thing called HVAC leads, the rest of the decisions get easier: what you advertise in April, where each click should land, who answers which line, and what counts as a good month.

How to get HVAC leads, channel by channel

There are more channels than most contractors are shown. Most HVAC lead generation plans lean on one or two of them and ignore the rest, usually because the two they use are the two somebody sold them.

Channels that harvest demand versus channels that create it

This is the distinction that organizes everything else.

Search ads, Local Services Ads and your Google Business Profile can only capture searches that something else already caused. In HVAC, that something else is the weather. This matters more than it sounds: in a genuinely dead week, "spend more on search" has a ceiling that has nothing to do with your budget. There is no amount of money that makes people search for furnace repair in July.

Paid social and video work the other way. They put a message in front of someone who wasn't looking, which is the only real answer to a dead week. The trade-off is worth hearing plainly: the measurement path is longer and easier to argue about. You will not get the clean click-to-call line you get from search, and you will spend some months unsure whether it is working.

That difference should change how you judge each one. A harvesting channel is judged on efficiency, because the demand arrived on its own and your job was to catch it. A creating channel is judged over a longer window, because the person you reached in April may not need you until June.

The slow assets: organic search, Google Business Profile, reviews, referrals

These carry the trough. They cost nothing per lead, they compound, and they are the reason two contractors with identical ad budgets get different results. You cannot turn any of them up on a Tuesday.

Your Google Business Profile deserves more attention than it usually gets, because it is free, it sits in the map results for exactly the searches you want, and its inputs are things you control: accurate hours, real photographs, the services you actually offer, and replies to reviews. Organic rankings take longer still and are the closest thing to an asset on this list, in that they keep producing after you stop working on them.

Worth saying the unpopular part about referrals: they are not free, they are invisible. They give you no control over timing or job mix, which are exactly the two things a seasonal contractor needs control of. Word of mouth sends you whatever it sends you, whenever it sends it. That is a wonderful base and a terrible plan, and the contractors who get hurt by it are usually the ones who never built anything else because the phone was ringing.

The fast assets: search ads, Local Services Ads, lead marketplaces

Search ads and lead marketplaces are available this week. Local Services Ads take three to four weeks of screening before your first lead, which is covered further below and is the single most common scheduling mistake in this trade. All three are priced per click or per lead.

Search ads are where you aim spend at a chosen service line with the most precision. If you want more heat pump quotes and fewer low-ticket service calls, search is where that decision gets made. Local Services Ads buy volume and a visible verification badge. Lead marketplaces buy speed, at the price of exclusivity.

If Local Services Ads are new to you, the Canadian requirements and screening timeline are in our guide to Local Services Ads for contractors. If you also run plumbing or drain work, the channel map is broadly the same: getting plumbing leads uses the same six channels. What changes between trades is the shape of the demand curve.

What HVAC leads cost, in Ontario dollars

Most pages on this topic quote a US cost per lead and stop. Here is the local version, plus the method so you can repeat it for your own city instead of trusting anyone's number, including ours.

What a click costs in Ontario

The table below comes from Google's free Keyword Planner, geo-targeted to Ontario, for July 2025 through June 2026, in Canadian dollars. It is market-level demand data from a public tool, not results from anyone's account.

Three caveats belong in the same breath as those numbers. Keyword Planner's average CPC is a historical planner estimate, not what a live account pays. The competition column in that tool measures how full the ad slots are, not how expensive they are, so do not read it as a price signal. And the tool is account-gated: low-spend accounts often see ranges rather than point values, so your own pull may not match these exactly. Pull your own city anyway, because the province is not your service area. For a fuller picture of what a campaign costs to run, see what Google Ads cost for contractors.

The cooling gap is the sharpest thing in that table. Air conditioner installation runs at $27.42 against $8.74 for "ac not working", roughly three times the price for the search that signals the bigger job. The furnace pair is narrower, $21.99 for replacement against $15.07 for repair, but it points the same way. Bigger job, dearer click.

Heat pump is the cheapest term in this set at $7.41, and that is worth a note of caution rather than a celebration. A low click price inside a high-value category usually says something about who is doing the searching, not about a gap in the market nobody noticed. Judge it the way you should judge everything else on this page: on booked jobs, not on what the click cost.

What a lead costs, and why published benchmarks need a label

For cost per lead, the most citable public figure comes from LocaliQ's 2025 benchmarks, drawn from 3,211 home services search campaigns: heating and air conditioning averaged $9.68 per click, a 7.48% conversion rate, and $129.02 per lead. Those are US dollars from a US dataset. Do not convert them and call it a Canadian benchmark.

The direction of travel is more useful than the level. In that same dataset, cost per click rose for 75% of home services businesses and cost per lead rose for 69%, with cost per lead up an average of 10.51% year over year in home services against 5.13% across all industries. Home services is getting more expensive faster than the average category. (LocaliQ, 2025 Search Ad Benchmarks for Home Services)

The metric that decides anything

Cost per lead is not the score.

A service call and a full system replacement look identical in a conversion count and differ by an order of magnitude in what they are worth to you. Two contractors can sit at exactly the same cost per lead and be in completely different businesses, one of them profitable and one of them busy. The number that decides anything is cost per booked job, and better still, cost per revenue dollar broken out by job type.

That is harder to produce than a cost per lead, which is the honest reason most people quote the easier number. It requires you to know which lead became which job and what that job was worth, which is a bookkeeping habit before it is a marketing technique. It is also the difference between a report that flatters you and a report you can act on.

The demand curve you are advertising against

Everyone in this trade knows the work is seasonal. Fewer people know by how much, and the gap between "it's seasonal" and an actual number is where the expensive decisions get made.

How far it swings

Ontario monthly search volume, from the same free Keyword Planner as the cost table above, for July 2025 through June 2026.

Keyword Planner reports volume in buckets rather than exact counts, which is why the same figure shows up against more than one term. Read these as the shape of the curve, not as a census.

Furnace repair moves by roughly a factor of eleven across the year. Air conditioning repair moves by roughly six. The panic phrasing moves hardest of all: "ac not working" effectively disappears outside cooling season.

This is not an Ontario quirk. WebFX measured US query volumes over two years and found AC repair up 266% from February to July, furnace repair varying by 137%, and emergency AC repair swinging 393% between its high and low. (WebFX, Seasonal Search Shifts in Home Services Demand)

Most of the problem is an artifact of looking at one service line at a time

The bottom row of that table is the point of this section.

Add furnace repair and air conditioning repair together month by month and the combined curve peaks at 24,700 and bottoms at 11,000. Furnace alone swings about eleven times. AC alone swings about six. Both together swing about two.

Your business is far less seasonal than any single service line makes it look. The two curves are close to being each other's opposite, which means the off-season a contractor feels is usually the off-season of whichever service line they happened to be thinking about. The company is not idle in July. The furnace side of it is.

That changes what the advertising question even is. It stops being "how do I survive the trough" and becomes "how do I move budget between two service lines that peak six months apart."

The famine month is April, not July

This follows directly from the combined curve and it contradicts almost every gut instinct in the trade.

The genuine low point of the Ontario year in that data is April, sitting between the two peaks, which is exactly where you would expect it once you stop looking at one curve at a time. July is not a trough at all: furnace repair is at its floor, but cooling demand is at its ceiling.

So the contractor who cuts back in the off-season is very often cutting in a month that is fine, and spending normally through the shoulder weeks that are actually thin. The mental model produces the wrong calendar, and the calendar is what the budget follows.

How to spend across a seasonal year without switching off

The default plan in HVAC is a switch: on when it's hot, off when it isn't. Here is the alternative, and why the switch costs more than it saves.

Decide the annual number first, then distribute it

Framing the decision monthly is what produces the on and off reflex. If every month has to justify itself in isolation, April will always lose.

Decide the annual allocation once, then distribute it across the year deliberately. This is also how the platform works. Google Ads budgets are set as an average daily figure that paces across the month, and Google's guidance is blunt about the arithmetic: "If you're working with a monthly budget, divide that number by 30.4." Seasonal spending is an allocation you set in advance, not a reaction you have on a Tuesday. (Google Ads Help, Set and change an average daily budget)

The shape you want is a floor and a peak. A maintained floor through the shoulder months that keeps the account serving and collecting data, and a planned expansion into the spike. Never a switch.

What switching off costs

Three costs stack, and only the first one is visible.

You forfeit the planned-purchase demand that exists all year. Replacement, heat pumps and maintenance work do not stop in April just because emergencies do.

You discard position and data you already paid to build. That is the part contractors underestimate, because it does not show up as a line item anywhere.

And you restart cold into the most expensive auction of the year. Google states that a bid strategy can take up to three weeks, or one to two conversion cycles, to calibrate after a significant change. Restarting during the first real cold snap means learning in public during the only weeks that matter, against competitors who are already calibrated. (Google Ads Help, Duration of the learning period)

Judge shoulder-season spend on the right clock

Replacement decisions carry a real lag. Somebody clicks in February, gets three quotes, talks to their spouse about financing, and books in April. If you judge February's spend on February's leads, that job never gets credited to the click that caused it.

This is how working campaigns get fired. Same-month measurement undervalues shoulder-season advertising and then produces a tidy case for switching it off.

Related, and just as important: never compare a seasonal account month over month. In this trade, month-over-month movement is a measurement of the weather. Year over year is the only comparison that tells you anything about the marketing.

1. 1

   Set the annual allocation

   Decide what the year costs before you decide what April costs. Monthly framing is what creates the switch.

2. 2

   Find your own trough months

   Pull your own city in Keyword Planner rather than assuming. Ontario bottoms out in April, and your market may differ.

3. 3

   Hold a serving floor through them

   Enough spend to keep the account live, collecting data and holding position. Not peak money, and not zero.

4. 4

   Pre-build the peak assets in the quiet weeks

   Seasonal pages, offers, review volume and any Local Services Ads screening. Nothing you start in July helps you in July.

5. 5

   Expand into the spike on the forecast

   The season starts when the first heat wave or cold snap lands, not on a date in your calendar. Watch the forecast, not the month.

Local Services Ads for HVAC in Canada, and what changed

Local Services Ads are a separate product from search ads. They charge per lead rather than per click, and they rank on inputs that have nothing to do with keywords or ad copy. For an HVAC contractor in Canada they are worth having, they are slower to start than anyone expects, and most of the advice written about them describes a program that no longer exists.

HVAC is eligible in Canada, and it is screened harder than most trades

Google treats this category as a special case and says so directly: "The HVAC category is considered an urgent category because consumers often call HVAC professionals for time-sensitive, urgent needs, such as a heater that is broken in freezing temperatures." The consequence is in the next line: "For this reason, HVAC professionals undergo an additional level of screening, which includes service professional background checks."

In Canada that means three background checks (business, owner, and service professional), two insurances (general liability and professional liability), and business plus owner licensing at the province or country level. That last requirement carries a footnote worth reading before you go hunting for a credential: "Where applicable by local law." Google is not naming a specific Ontario licence there. (Google Local Services Help, Canada requirements)

The service professional background check is the piece most contractors are not expecting, because it reaches past the business and the owner to the people who actually go into homes. Plan for it as a staffing conversation as well as a paperwork one. More detail on the general setup is in our guide to Local Services Ads for contractors.

Budget four weeks, and start before you need it

Google says screening takes three to four weeks on average after your documents are submitted. Separately, a public and verified Google Business Profile is mandatory: "Local Services advertisers must have a public and verified Google Business profile to advertise with Local Service Ads." (Google Local Services Help, Canada requirements)

Read those two facts together and the timing answer writes itself. A contractor who begins onboarding when the first cold snap lands is a month late, and the month they miss is the one the whole year turns on.

1. 1

   Verify the Google Business Profile first

   It is a prerequisite, not a nice-to-have. Nothing else proceeds until it is public and verified.

2. 2

   Gather insurance and licensing documents

   General liability and professional liability, plus business and owner licensing where local law requires it.

3. 3

   Submit background checks for the business, the owner and your service professionals

   The third one is the HVAC-specific tier and is the piece most contractors are not expecting.

4. 4

   Allow three to four weeks and use them

   Build the profile out while you wait: photos, service areas, hours, and as many reviews as you can collect.

How Local Services Ads decide who shows, and why your ad copy is not on the list

The auction runs on three things. Your bid. How likely the ad is to result in a lead, which includes your responsiveness, what the customer searched for, and business relevance. And profile quality, which Google lists as "your rating, number of reviews, average response time, use of high-quality images, the verification checks you have completed."

Google also states that "higher quality profiles, including those with images, may rank higher and may also pay lower costs per lead." Photographs are a ranking input and a price input at the same time, which makes them one of the cheapest pieces of work on this page. (Google Local Services Help, About ad rankings)

Notice what is absent from that list. No keywords. No headlines. No creative testing. There is nothing in the ranking inputs you can use to say "send me heat pump quotes, not after-hours service calls."

That is why Local Services Ads sit alongside search rather than replacing it. They buy you volume and a trust badge. They cannot be aimed at a service line, and aiming at a service line is one of the few genuine controls you have over what kind of business your advertising produces.

Buying leads versus generating them

A large share of people searching for HVAC leads are not looking to build a channel. They want to buy leads today. That is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer.

What you are buying from a marketplace

Lead marketplaces sell the same lead to several contractors. That is the product, not a defect in it, and the good ones are upfront about it.

What it means practically is that the sticker price is not the price. If four contractors get the same homeowner and you close one in four, your real cost per job is four times the lead fee plus whatever your time is worth on the three you lost. Comparing a marketplace fee to the cost of an exclusive lead from your own advertising is not a like-for-like comparison, and close rate is the variable that decides which one is cheaper for you specifically.

Published marketplace prices swing so widely across sources and markets that quoting a range would be inventing a benchmark. Ask the platform what your category costs in your postal code and test it with your own money, in a month you can afford to test in.

Where marketplaces genuinely fit

A new company with no reviews and no ranking has a real cold-start problem. Every channel that works well needs something you do not have yet. Buying shared leads is a rational way to generate the first jobs, which generate the first reviews, which make Local Services Ads and organic search start working.

Treat it as a bridge with an exit date on it. The failure mode is not using a marketplace. It is using one for four years and never building anything that would let you stop.

The answer to "how do I get free HVAC leads"

Google Business Profile, reviews, referrals from adjacent trades, and content that ranks. All four are free in cash and expensive in time and patience. None of them are fast, and none of them will fill next week.

What to sell in the shoulder months

April is thin for emergencies. It is not thin for everything. Here is what an HVAC company can advertise when nobody's furnace is broken.

Replacement and heat pumps, which are not weather-triggered

Heat pump demand in Ontario barely moves across the year, which makes it one of the few things you can advertise in April without stretching. Replacement generally is a researched purchase: homeowners get two or three quotes, discuss financing, and take weeks to decide.

That behaviour is a shoulder-season asset rather than a problem. In April the buyer has time to think and the auction is quieter than it will be in July. It deserves its own page, its own message and its own measurement, because it behaves nothing like emergency work and it will look like a failure if you measure it on the emergency clock.

Rebates change the conversation, and the landscape shifted recently

Ontario's Home Renovation Savings program, delivered by Save on Energy and Enbridge Gas with Ontario government support, offers up to $12,000 on heat pumps on the path that does not require a home energy assessment. That is a real number a homeowner can act on, and most contractor advertising underuses it. (Save on Energy, Home Renovation Savings)

The federal picture has changed and a lot of advertising has not caught up. The Canada Greener Homes Grant and the Canada Greener Homes Loan are both closed, and Natural Resources Canada states plainly that no further applications can be approved on the loan. Do not describe either as live funding. (NRCan, Canada Greener Homes Initiative)

Federal oil-to-heat-pump funding still exists but is narrow, aimed at homeowners currently heating with oil and subject to household income limits, and Ontario is co-delivered on different terms from the federally run provinces. Confirm the current intake status and the current terms before you build any campaign or ad copy around it. (NRCan, participating provinces and territories)

Maintenance agreements, the industry's structural answer to all of this

ACCA reports that recurring service agreements represent 55% of HVACR industry revenue. It suggests a minimum 25% conversion rate from service call to agreement, with specialist maintenance techs reaching 70% or better. It also cites Harvard Business Review that acquiring a customer costs five to twenty-five times what retaining one costs. (ACCA HVAC Blog, service agreement sales)

Agreements convert one-time emergency buyers into scheduled shoulder-season work and a base that calls you first. Now the unglamorous part: the way to sell them is converting the service calls you already have, on the truck, at the end of the job. Buying maintenance-plan clicks cold is a slow and expensive route to the same place. Advertising supports this. It does not substitute for it.

Turning HVAC leads into booked jobs

Lead count is the number everybody watches and it is rarely the number that is broken.

Your lead count is hiding two different businesses

Emergency work converts in minutes, by phone, and is comparatively price insensitive. Replacement is researched, quoted against competitors, sometimes financed, and closes over weeks. Averaged together into one lead count, both become unreadable: a good replacement month can look like a bad month because the service calls were down.

Split them at the source. Separate campaigns, separate pages, separate phone handling, separate reporting. It takes an afternoon to decide and it makes every performance conversation after that one useful instead of circular. If the calls themselves are the problem rather than the mix, why your Google Ads are not getting calls covers the usual causes.

Send job outcomes back to the ad platform

Send the value of the job, not just the fact that a lead happened, and send it against the lead it came from. That is the change. A system told only that a conversion occurred will work toward more conversions. A system told what each one was worth will work toward revenue.

1. 1

   Tag every lead with its job type at intake

   Emergency or planned, at the moment it arrives, by whoever picks up. If this is not captured at intake it is guesswork later.

2. 2

   Record what each one was worth once it closes

   The invoiced value against the original lead. This is the step most contractors skip, and without it nothing downstream works.

3. 3

   Send those values back to the ad platform

   Once values are flowing, bidding has something better than a headcount to work toward.

Capacity inverts the entire answer

When you are booked three weeks out in July, more lead volume is a cost, not a win. On pay-per-lead channels you are charged whether or not you can take the job.

At that point the correct lever is almost never "buy more calls." It is shifting spend toward higher-ticket work and tightening the geography, because drive time eats HVAC margin faster than most owners account for. Platform defaults will also cheerfully serve people who are merely interested in an area rather than located in it, which is worth checking if you advertise around a dense market like Toronto. Ad budget and crew capacity are one decision, not two, and the contractors who treat them as two spend peak season buying leads they cannot service and shoulder season with idle trucks.

The Ontario rules that affect what you can say in an HVAC ad

This is not legal advice. Two of these facts change what you are allowed to put on a landing page.

Both HVAC trades in Ontario are compulsory, which is a credential worth advertising

Refrigeration and Air Conditioning Systems Mechanic (313A) and Residential Air Conditioning Systems Mechanic (313D) are both compulsory trades. To practise legally a person must hold a Registered Training Agreement, Provisional Certificate of Qualification or Certificate of Qualification, and appear on the Skilled Trades Ontario Public Register.

313A is part of the Interprovincial Red Seal Program (Skilled Trades Ontario, 313A). 313D is not, and is a 4,500 hour apprenticeship of roughly two and a half years (Skilled Trades Ontario, 313D). A verifiable credential stated plainly on a landing page is a conversion asset, and it is one most contractors leave in a drawer because it feels like table stakes to them. It does not feel like table stakes to a homeowner who has just read three warnings about unlicensed installers.

Gas credentials are set in regulation, not by policy

The G.1, G.2 and G.3 certificate classes are made in Ontario Regulation 215/01, Fuels Industry Certificates. Certificates expire on the second anniversary of the holder's date of birth after issuance, which is worth knowing before you print a claim on a page that will sit there for a year without anyone rereading it. (O. Reg. 215/01)

What you may and may not put in the ad

The practical version is short. You may state the certification you hold, tied to the work it covers. You may not use it as a general badge of quality across services it does not cover, and you may not use TSSA's mark.

That has two everyday consequences. A headline claiming certification has to sit on a page and a campaign about the work you are actually certified for, which is another argument for one service per page rather than a single homepage carrying every claim you own. And the logo question is settled, not a judgment call: it does not go on the page.

What running this properly takes

Some of this you should do yourself, and some of it is a job.

The action window is days, not months

The season turns on a forecast, not a date. A plan built on ramping up in June is guessing at a date the weather sets, and the weather moves it by weeks in either direction. Competitors change bids mid heat wave. Search terms drift continuously. The correct response window is days, and it lands during exactly the weeks you are finishing a changeover at 9pm with the voicemail full.

The work is not hard step by step, it is hard because it never stops

Most HVAC marketing advice describes the setup and stops there, because the setup is the part that photographs well. The setup is not the hard part. Cleaning up the searches you pay for is a permanent job in this trade, because a large share of the people typing HVAC words into Google are never going to hire anyone: they are fixing it themselves, pricing a part, downloading a manual, or looking for work.

None of that is difficult to review once. Doing it fifty weeks a year while running a service company is a different proposition, and the weeks it matters most are the weeks you have the least attention to give it.

What you can reasonably do yourself, and where the line usually falls

Your Google Business Profile, your review flow, page-level message match and answering the phone are entirely doable in-house, and that is where most of the available gain sits for a contractor who is not currently doing them. None of those require a specialist. They require somebody to own them.

The pieces that go wrong unsupervised are budget pacing across a season, controlling which searches you pay for, and getting job values flowing back to the platform. Those need somebody watching weekly rather than quarterly, and they are the three that quietly cost money rather than obviously breaking. If you are weighing that up, what Google Ads agencies charge covers the going rates, and you can see how we work if you want the version where somebody else holds it.

Before you spend another dollar

Seven things, in order, most of which cost nothing:

1. Pull your own city's demand curve in Keyword Planner rather than trusting a provincial average.
2. Identify your real trough months from that pull. They are probably not the ones you assume.
3. Check your answer rate and after-hours coverage before you touch a budget.
4. Split emergency work from replacement in your campaigns, your pages and your reporting.
5. Set the annual number, then set the shoulder-season floor you will hold.
6. Start Local Services Ads screening at least four weeks before you need it.
7. Get job values flowing back to the platform, so bidding works toward revenue instead of volume.

The timing point is the one with a cost attached. Screening takes three to four weeks, review volume takes months, and the season starts on a forecast rather than a date. Everything on that list is cheap in April and impossible in January. If you would rather not run it yourself, that is what we do.