Short answer: Hire an HVAC PPC agency when your ad spend is high enough that a 10 to 20 percent management fee is smaller than the waste an untrained hand leaves in the account, which in practice starts somewhere around $5,000 a month in spend. Run it in house below that, because at $2,000 a month of spend a $1,500 retainer is not a management fee, it is a second ad budget you are not allowed to spend on ads. Whichever you choose, do it before your Local Services Ads account migrates into Google Ads, because your historical campaign performance does not come with it.
Migration dates, billing model and data-transfer details are quoted from Google's own Local Services Ads and Google Ads Help documentation. Agency fee ranges are what agencies themselves publish; no neutral body audits them, so treat them as asking prices rather than measured averages.
What the two options actually cost
The honest comparison is not agency fee against zero. Running paid search in house has real costs, they are just paid in hours and in mistakes instead of invoices. Here is the shape of it for a single-location contractor.
| In house | Agency | |
|---|---|---|
| Cash cost | Tools, typically $50 to $300 a month | 10 to 20 percent of ad spend, or a flat retainer commonly quoted from about $1,500 a month |
| Time cost | 4 to 10 hours a month once set up, more in the first quarter | An hour on a monthly call, plus the time to check the work |
| Time to competence | One to two seasons of expensive learning | Immediate, if the agency has real HVAC accounts |
| Who owns the account | You do, always | Depends entirely on the contract. Read this clause before signing |
| Landing pages | Yours to fix, which is the part most contractors skip | Often out of scope or billed separately |
| Breaks at | Multi-location, multi-trade, or spend above roughly $15,000 a month | Low spend, where the fee swamps the benefit |
The percentage model is worth understanding before you agree to it. At 15 percent, a contractor spending $4,000 a month pays $600 for management and a contractor spending $40,000 pays $6,000, for work that is not ten times harder. Above roughly $15,000 in monthly spend, a flat fee usually beats a percentage, and it is a normal thing to negotiate.
The fee model works differently on Local Services Ads
Here is where contractor advice and general PPC advice come apart. Local Services Ads do not work like Search campaigns. Google's documentation is explicit that LSA leads "come in as phone calls and messages sent through your Local Services ad," and that you pay per valid lead rather than per click. There is no keyword list, no ad copy to test, and no landing page in the path at all, because the customer never reaches your website.
That has two consequences for this decision. An agency charging a percentage of LSA spend is charging a percentage of your lead cost, which is a much thinner service than managing a keyword account: there is no bidding strategy to tune, no negative keyword list to build, and no creative to write. What is left is budget pacing, service-area setup, disputing bad leads, and keeping your review count healthy. That is real work and worth paying for, but it is not the same job, and it should not carry the same fee.
The other consequence is that if most of your leads come from LSAs, an agency cannot fix your cost per lead with better ads, because there are no ads to make better. What moves LSA performance is your review profile, your response speed, your service area, and your budget. Contractors who sign a management retainer expecting LSA leads to get cheaper are usually disappointed, and it is not the agency's fault.
The deadline almost nobody mentions
Google has started moving Local Services Ads out of the standalone LSA dashboard and into the main Google Ads interface, as a Performance Max campaign with pay-per-lead goals. Per Google's Help documentation, the first phase began in August 2026 for selected home and storefront service advertisers in the United States, and the named categories are plumbing, HVAC, electrical, appliance repair, house cleaning, lawn care, roofing, pest control, and moving. Later phases run through the rest of 2026 and into 2027 for service-area businesses without a storefront and for accounts outside the US.
The economics stay the same. Google's wording is that "You still only pay for valid leads (such as phone calls and messages) rather than ad clicks," the campaign stays keywordless, and setup is pre-populated from your Google Business Profile. The part to act on is the data. Your past lead history transfers, including contact details and message history, but Google states that "previous campaign-level performance metrics (such as past impressions, clicks, weekly spend, and ad-level performance reports) will not migrate to Google Ads."
If you are switching agencies, firing one, or bringing the account in house, that export is the whole argument. Whoever holds the login during the migration window controls whether you keep your own baseline. Download the reporting before the account moves. A contractor who loses two seasons of weekly spend and lead-volume history walks into next summer unable to tell a good month from a bad one, and no agency, incoming or outgoing, can reconstruct it for you afterward.
What an agency genuinely does better
Three things, and it is worth being straight about them rather than pretending the in-house route is free.
The first is the expensive learning curve. A good HVAC agency has already discovered that broad match on "air conditioning" buys you window unit shoppers and college students writing papers, that "repair" and "replacement" are different businesses with different budgets, and roughly what a booked job is worth in your market. You can learn all of that yourself. You will pay tuition in wasted clicks for a season or two.
The second is coverage. Somebody watches the account when your best tech quits in July and your own attention goes elsewhere for three weeks. An in-house account that nobody looks at during the busy season is where money quietly disappears.
The third is scale. Multiple locations, multiple trades, or a serious seasonal swing in budget is genuinely a job, not a task. Above roughly $15,000 a month in spend, competent management usually pays for itself on wasted-spend reduction alone.
What agencies are frequently worse at is the thing that sits between the click and the phone call. Landing pages are often out of scope, billed separately, or built once and never revisited, which is why so many contractor accounts have a well-tuned keyword list pointing at a page that has not changed since the site was launched.
What you can run in house without an agency
If your spend is under about $5,000 a month, most of the available upside is not in bid management at all. It is in four things you can handle yourself.
Separate your campaigns by intent. Emergency repair, replacement quotes, and maintenance plans are three different buyers, and pointing them at one budget and one page means the cheapest clicks eat the budget the expensive jobs needed.
Build the negative keyword list. This is the single highest-return hour in a contractor account and it needs nothing but the search terms report and some patience. Filter out DIY, parts, jobs, salary, training, and the brand names of manufacturers you do not service.
Fix the page the clicks land on. This is the part agencies skip and contractors underestimate. Your account already carries Google's opinion of it: landing page experience is defined as "how relevant and useful your landing page is to people who click your ad," reported per keyword as Above average, Average, or Below average, and set by comparison with other advertisers over the last 90 days. Worth knowing before an agency sells you on it: Google also states that "Quality Score is not a key performance indicator and should not be optimized" and that "Quality Score is not an input in the ad auction." It is a diagnostic, not a target. Our HVAC landing page optimization page covers what to change on a contractor page specifically, starting with the fact that the conversion is a phone call and not a form.
Carry the trust signals. License number, insurance, real review counts, and service area belong above the fold, because hiring a stranger to enter a house is a trust decision before it is a price decision. Contractors chasing commercial and property management work run into the paperwork side of the same problem, where every job wants a current certificate of insurance on demand, and keeping those certificates tracked and current turns into its own administrative job once you have more than a handful of properties on the books.
The sequence that wastes the least money
Start in house and stay there while you are small. Get LSAs running and your reviews up, since that is the cheapest lead source most contractors have. Add a Search campaign split by intent, build the negative list, and fix the landing page. Export your reporting before the migration touches your account. Then, when spend crosses roughly $5,000 a month and you can no longer look at it weekly, hire an agency, and negotiate a flat fee rather than a percentage if your spend is heading past $15,000.
Do not hire an agency to solve a landing page problem. You will pay a management fee for months while the leak stays exactly where it was. This is the same mistake documented in CRO agency vs CRO tool, and it plays out identically in the trades: the cheap fix gets skipped because the expensive one feels more serious.
How much does HVAC PPC management cost?
Agencies commonly publish 10 to 20 percent of monthly ad spend, or flat retainers starting around $1,500 a month and rising with scope and number of locations. Home service marketing packages that bundle SEO, ads and web work are quoted considerably higher. No neutral body audits these figures, so treat them as asking prices and compare at least three quotes on the same scope.
Is a PPC agency worth it for a small HVAC company?
Usually not below about $5,000 a month in ad spend. At $2,000 of spend, a $1,500 retainer means 43 percent of your total paid search budget buys no clicks at all. The exception is a contractor entering a competitive metro from zero, where a season of an experienced hand can be cheaper than a season of your own mistakes.
Can I manage Google Ads for my HVAC business myself?
Yes, at small spend. Budget 4 to 10 hours a month once the account is set up, and expect the first quarter to take longer. The work that matters most is not bid tuning: it is splitting campaigns by intent, building the negative keyword list, and fixing the page the clicks land on. Those three are learnable and they are where most of the waste lives.
Who owns the Google Ads account, me or the agency?
Whoever the contract says, which is why you read that clause before signing. Insist on ownership of the Google Ads account, the Google Business Profile, the conversion tracking, and the landing pages, with the agency added as a manager. An agency that resists this is telling you something useful about what leaving will cost you.
Will my Local Services Ads data transfer to Google Ads?
Partly. Google states that past lead history, including customer contact details, message history and older call recordings, transfers automatically. Campaign-level performance metrics such as past impressions, clicks, weekly spend and ad-level performance reports do not. Download your reporting before your account migrates, particularly if an agency currently holds the login.
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