HVAC Lead Quality: How to Filter Junk Clicks

The average HVAC contractor wastes 25-40% of their Google Ads budget on clicks that will never become a booked job. That is not a typo. Across the HVAC accounts we manage, the first audit almost always uncovers thousands of dollars per month going to DIY searchers, job seekers, bot traffic, and homeowners three states away. Managing PPC for HVAC contractors has taught us that lead volume means nothing if half your clicks come from people who were never going to pick up the phone and schedule a service call.

This post is the playbook we use internally to filter junk clicks out of every HVAC campaign we touch. Every tactic here comes from real account data, not theory. If you implement even half of these filters, you should see cost-per-qualified-lead drop 20-35% within the first 30 days.

Why HVAC Campaigns Attract So Much Junk Traffic

HVAC keywords sit at an unfortunate intersection: high search volume, broad intent variation, and expensive CPCs. When someone types "AC repair," Google has to decide whether they want to hire a technician, watch a YouTube tutorial, apply for a job, or buy a replacement part on Amazon. Without proper filtering, your $18-$30 click goes to all four of those people equally.

Three factors make HVAC campaigns especially vulnerable:

• Broad service terminology -- "HVAC," "air conditioning," and "furnace" map to commercial, residential, DIY, educational, and career-related searches
• Seasonal search spikes -- When temps hit extremes, search volume surges and Google's matching algorithms get more aggressive with broad and phrase match, pulling in more marginal queries
• High CPCs attract fraud -- Click fraud bots and competitor click abuse gravitate toward expensive keywords because each fake click drains more of your budget

The good news: every one of these problems has a systematic fix.

Building a Bulletproof Negative Keyword List

Negative keywords are the single most impactful filter for HVAC lead quality. A well-maintained negative list can eliminate 20-30% of wasted spend on its own. Here is the core negative keyword list we deploy on day one of every HVAC account:

DIY and Informational Negatives

These block searches from people trying to fix their own system:

• how to
• DIY
• tutorial
• video
• YouTube
• manual
• diagram
• schematic
• parts list
• troubleshoot
• reset button
• do it yourself

Career and Education Negatives

HVAC career searches generate massive volume, especially on broad match:

• jobs
• salary
• hiring
• careers
• apprentice
• certification
• school
• training
• license
• technician salary
• HVAC degree
• trade school

Shopping and Product Negatives

These filter out people buying equipment or parts online:

• Amazon
• Home Depot
• Lowes
• Walmart
• wholesale
• for sale
• buy online
• price list
• catalog
• filters
• thermostat
• window unit
• portable

Brand and Competitor Negatives

Unless you are running a deliberate competitor conquest campaign, add competitor brand names and franchise names that do not apply to your business. If you are a local independent contractor, negative match the big national franchises whose branded searchers are looking for those specific companies, not you.

We review and expand this list weekly using the search terms report. The list grows to 300-500 terms within the first 90 days of managing any HVAC account.

Filtering DIY Searches With Match Type Strategy

Negative keywords catch explicit DIY terms, but match type selection prevents the problem at its source. Here is how we structure keyword match types for HVAC lead quality:

• Exact match for your highest-value, highest-intent keywords: [ac repair near me], [emergency furnace repair], [hvac installation quotes]. These give you precise control over which searches trigger your ads.
• Phrase match for mid-funnel service terms: "ac repair" + city name, "furnace replacement" + neighborhood. Phrase match allows useful variations while blocking completely unrelated queries.
• Broad match only when paired with Smart Bidding and at least 30 conversions per month in the campaign. Even then, review the search terms report twice per week and add negatives aggressively.

The contractors who come to us with lead quality problems are almost always running broad match across the board with fewer than 50 negative keywords. That combination is a junk-click magnet.

Blocking Competitor Click Abuse

Click fraud is not hypothetical in HVAC. We have documented cases where a single competitor IP address generated 15-25 clicks per week on a client's ads, costing $300-$600/month in wasted spend. Google's built-in invalid click detection catches some of this, but not all of it.

Signs of competitor click abuse:

• Repeated clicks from the same geographic area with zero conversions
• Unusual click spikes during business hours that do not correspond to weather events or seasonal patterns
• High bounce rates (90%+) from specific locations or IP ranges

How to fight it:

• Enable IP exclusions in Google Ads for known bad actors (you can identify these through server logs or third-party click fraud tools)
• Use a click fraud detection platform like ClickCease or Lunio that automatically blocks suspicious IPs in real time. These tools typically cost $50-$150/month but save HVAC accounts $300-$1,000/month in fraudulent clicks
• Set up automated alerts for click-through rate spikes that do not correlate with conversion increases

Audience Exclusions That Protect Your Budget

Google Ads audience targeting is not just for adding people to your campaigns -- the exclusion side is equally powerful. For HVAC, we recommend excluding these audience segments:

• Job seekers -- Google has an in-market audience for "Employment" that you can apply as a negative observation or exclusion
• Students -- The "Education" detailed demographics segment captures people in school who are researching HVAC as a career, not as a homeowner needing service
• Renters (in some markets) -- For high-ticket services like system installation, excluding renters can improve lead quality since renters rarely authorize $8,000-$15,000 equipment purchases. Use the "Homeowners" affinity audience as a positive target instead

Layer these exclusions on top of your negative keyword list for compounding protection. In our experience, audience exclusions alone reduce junk form fills by 10-15%.

Tired of paying for clicks that never turn into booked jobs? We specialize in PPC for HVAC contractors and can audit your campaign filters in 48 hours. Request your free audit here.

Geographic Filtering: Tighter Than You Think

Most HVAC contractors set a radius and forget it. But geographic filtering goes much deeper than a 25-mile circle on a map.

Location targeting settings matter. Google defaults to "Presence or interest," which means your ads show to anyone who searches about your city, even if they are physically located 500 miles away. Switch to "Presence: People in or regularly in your targeted locations" immediately. We have seen this single change reduce irrelevant clicks by 8-12% in metro markets.

Zip code exclusions inside your radius. Not every zip code within your service area is worth bidding on equally. Pull your conversion data by zip code and exclude or reduce bids on areas that produce clicks but not calls. Industrial zones, college campuses, and low-income areas often generate high click volume with low conversion rates for residential HVAC.

Bid adjustments by location. Increase bids 15-25% in zip codes where you close the most jobs and decrease bids 30-50% in fringe areas where your technicians rarely get dispatched.

Call-Only vs Click-to-Site: A Lead Quality Lever

The ad format you choose directly impacts lead quality. Here is how call-only and standard text ads compare for HVAC:

Call-only ads force a phone call as the conversion action, which naturally filters out casual browsers, bots, and DIY researchers. The tradeoff is lower volume -- not everyone wants to call -- but the quality jump is significant. We run call-only ads during business hours and switch to standard text ads with landing page forms after hours, capturing both high-intent callers and off-hours leads.

Time-of-Day Bid Adjustments

Not all hours produce equal lead quality. Our data across 30+ HVAC accounts shows consistent patterns:

• 6 AM - 9 AM: High intent. Homeowners wake up to a broken furnace or hot house and search immediately. Conversion rates peak here.
• 9 AM - 12 PM: Strong volume and decent quality. Mix of planned research and same-day needs.
• 12 PM - 5 PM: Highest volume but quality dips. More comparison shoppers and people researching during lunch breaks.
• 5 PM - 9 PM: Quality rebounds. Homeowners home from work discovering problems or following up on morning research.
• 9 PM - 6 AM: Lowest quality for non-emergency campaigns. Late-night clicks convert at one-third the rate of daytime clicks.

Action steps:

• Increase bids 20-30% during the 6-9 AM window
• Decrease bids 40-60% between 10 PM and 5 AM for non-emergency campaigns
• Keep emergency campaigns running 24/7 but monitor after-hours conversion rates monthly
• Pause maintenance and installation campaigns entirely during hours that consistently produce zero conversions

Identifying and Blocking Bot Traffic

Bot traffic is a growing problem in PPC, and HVAC is not immune. Here are the signals we watch for:

• Session duration under 2 seconds with zero page interactions -- real humans at least glance at your page
• 100% bounce rate from specific referral sources or geographic clusters
• Form submissions with gibberish names, fake phone numbers, or email addresses from disposable domains (mailinator, guerrillamail, etc.)
• Click patterns that repeat at exact intervals -- bots often click every 30 or 60 seconds

Use Google Analytics 4 engagement metrics alongside your Google Ads data to cross-reference. If a campaign shows 50 clicks but GA4 shows only 30 sessions, the gap suggests invalid traffic that Google partially filtered but still charged you for.

Integrate your CRM with Google Ads via offline conversion imports so the algorithm learns which clicks actually become customers -- and deprioritizes the traffic sources that produce dead-end leads.

Search Term Report Audits: Your Weekly Discipline

The search terms report is where you discover what people actually typed before clicking your ad. It is the single most important report for lead quality, and you should review it weekly without exception.

Our audit process:

1. Sort by cost descending to see where the most money went
2. Flag every search term that is irrelevant, informational, or career-related
3. Add flagged terms as negative keywords immediately
4. Sort by conversions to identify high-performing terms that deserve their own exact-match keywords
5. Look for patterns -- if you see five variations of "HVAC technician salary," add "salary" as a phrase-match negative rather than adding each variation individually
6. Track the percentage of spend going to irrelevant terms over time. Target below 10%. Anything above 15% means your keyword strategy needs restructuring.

A disciplined weekly audit prevents waste from accumulating. We have taken over accounts where six months of neglected search term reports revealed $4,000-$8,000 in cumulative waste that could have been stopped in week one.

Lead Scoring Basics for HVAC

Not every lead that comes through your ads is equal, and treating them equally wastes your sales team's time. A basic lead scoring system helps prioritize follow-up and feeds better data back into Google Ads.

Score leads on these factors:

• Service type requested: System replacement (high value) vs. filter change question (low value)
• Urgency language: "My AC is broken right now" scores higher than "thinking about getting a quote sometime"
• Property type: Homeowner vs. renter, single-family vs. apartment
• Geographic proximity: Leads within your primary service zone vs. edge-of-radius leads
• Contact method: Phone call over 2 minutes scores higher than a one-line form submission

Import these lead quality scores back into Google Ads as conversion values. This teaches Smart Bidding to chase more of the high-scoring leads and fewer of the junk ones. Over 60-90 days, the algorithm shifts spend toward the search terms, audiences, times, and locations that produce your best customers -- not just the most form fills.

Junk Click Sources and Solutions at a Glance

Address these in order of impact. Negative keywords and match type fixes alone will eliminate the largest chunk of waste. Layer in the remaining filters over 30-60 days and you will see a measurable shift in lead quality metrics.

Putting It All Together

Filtering junk clicks is not a one-time project -- it is an ongoing discipline. The HVAC contractors who consistently generate the highest-quality leads from Google Ads are the ones who treat their campaigns like a system that needs weekly maintenance, not a switch they flipped on and forgot about.

Start with the negative keyword list and match type audit. Those two changes will produce the fastest improvement. Then layer in geographic tightening, ad schedule adjustments, audience exclusions, and click fraud protection over the following weeks. Review the search terms report every seven days without exception. Import lead quality data back into Google Ads so the algorithm gets smarter with every conversion.

The goal is not zero junk clicks -- that is impossible in paid search. The goal is getting junk click rates below 10% of total spend, which puts every dollar to work generating real phone calls from homeowners who need HVAC service today.

Ready to stop paying for clicks that waste your budget? We audit HVAC Google Ads accounts and build the filtering systems that protect every dollar you spend. Get your free HVAC PPC audit here.