The $10,000 Mistake: Running Paid Ads for Your Home Service Company Without Proper Behavior Tracking

The average HVAC company spends $2,000-5,000 per month on Google Ads. Over six months, that’s $12,000-30,000. If you don’t have conversion tracking set up, you have no idea which half of that money generated jobs and which half bought nothing but clicks from tire-kickers.

That’s not a hypothetical. Most contractors waste 50-70% of their Google Ads budget due to poor tracking and targeting. You’re writing checks to Google every month with no way to tell if the money is working.

The fix takes 30 minutes. But most contractors don’t know the problem exists until thousands of dollars are already gone.

What $10,000 in wasted ad spend actually looks like

LocaliQ analyzed thousands of home service campaigns in 2025 and published cost benchmarks by trade. The numbers are sobering.

HVAC companies pay $5.31 per click and $45.27 per lead. At $3,000 per month, that’s roughly 565 clicks and maybe 66 leads. Without conversion tracking, you don’t know which 66 clicks turned into leads and which 499 clicks were wasted.

Roofing is even more expensive at $10.70 per click and $228 per lead. The stakes per click are nearly double HVAC. One wasted month of broad-match keywords can blow through $3,000 and produce only 5 leads, none of which you can trace back to a specific keyword.

Plumbing has different math. WebFX data shows that emergency plumbing keywords convert at 15.6% on well-optimized campaigns. But running “plumber” as a broad match grabs DIY searches, job seekers, and people searching for plumber memes.

Your $5 click just bought you someone watching a TikTok about plumbing fails.

The three tracking gaps that waste your money

The construction industry averages a 1.9% Google Ads conversion rate. That’s already low. But without proper tracking, you can’t even tell if you’re hitting that number or falling below it.

Three specific gaps cause the most waste.

Gap one: no conversion tracking in Google Ads. Without it, you can see clicks and impressions, but you can’t see which keywords actually produce calls and form submissions. You’re spending money on data that doesn’t tell you what matters.

Gap two: no call tracking. Phone calls are 80% or more of home service conversions, but Google Ads only tracks form fills by default. If your best keyword drives 20 phone calls a month and zero form fills, it looks like a loser in your dashboard.

You might pause the one campaign that’s actually booking jobs.

Gap three: no landing page behavior data. You don’t know if people are reading your page or bouncing instantly. You don’t know if they can find your phone number.

You don’t know if your page loads fast enough on mobile.

How to fix conversion tracking

Set up Google Ads conversion actions for both form submissions and phone calls. This is the single most important thing you can do with your ad account.

Use Google Tag Manager to fire a conversion event when someone hits your thank-you page after submitting a form. If that sounds complicated, Google also offers a simpler codeless setup where you just enter your thank-you page URL directly.

Test it yourself. Submit your own form, then check Google Ads the next day to verify the conversion recorded. If it didn’t, your tracking is broken and every dollar you spend until you fix it is flying blind.

Without conversion data, Google’s algorithm can’t optimize your campaigns. Smart Bidding strategies like Target CPA and Maximize Conversions need conversion signals to learn what works. Without them, you’re paying for Google’s best guess.

How to fix call tracking

CallRail or CallTrackingMetrics starts at around $50 per month. That’s less than a single click in most home service categories.

Dynamic number insertion shows a unique tracking number to each website visitor. When someone calls, you’ll see the exact keyword that brought them to your site, which page they were on, and how long the call lasted.

The difference is night and day. Instead of “you got 15 calls this month,” you see: “This call came from the keyword ‘emergency AC repair near me’ and lasted 4 minutes” versus “This call came from ‘HVAC’ and lasted 12 seconds.”

Track call duration. Calls under 60 seconds are usually spam, wrong numbers, or people who hung up on your voicemail. Filtering these out gives you an accurate count of real leads so you know which keywords bring actual customers.

How to fix landing page behavior tracking

Microsoft Clarity is free and lets you watch session recordings of your Google Ads visitors. Install the script on your landing pages and you’ll see exactly what people do after clicking your ad.

Filter by referral source to see only paid traffic. You want to watch the visitors you’re paying for, not your organic traffic.

Common findings from Clarity recordings include: people can’t find the phone number, the call-to-action button is below the fold on mobile, the page takes too long to load on 4G connections, or the form is so long that visitors give up halfway through.

Every 1-second delay in page load time costs 7% of conversions. If your landing page takes 5 seconds to load on mobile instead of 2, you’ve already lost roughly 20% of potential leads before they even see your content.

The real cost of flying blind

Without tracking, you keep spending on broad keywords that attract tire-kickers. You can’t pause the campaigns that waste money because you don’t know which ones they are.

You also can’t justify increasing budget on campaigns that work. If your boss or business partner asks “should we spend more on Google Ads?” the honest answer without tracking is “I don’t know if what we’re spending now is working.”

Your marketing agency, if you have one, has no accountability without shared tracking data. They can show you clicks and impressions all day. But if you can’t tie those clicks to actual phone calls and booked jobs, you’re taking their word for it.

Air Titans reported on Reddit’s r/hvac that their customer acquisition cost through Meta ads was $120, compared to $800 through traditional channels. The difference wasn’t the platform - it was that they tracked every dollar to the job it produced. Without that tracking, they would have assumed all their marketing was equally effective.

Princeton Air Conditioning had a similar problem. They were running Google Ads with a 2.1% conversion rate and burning through budget. After adding proper geo-targeting and conversion tracking, their conversion rate jumped from 2.1% to 8.3%.

Same budget, four times the leads, because they could finally see what was working and cut what wasn’t.

What to set up today: a 30-minute action plan

You can close all three tracking gaps in about 30 minutes. None of this requires a developer.

Step 1: Google Ads conversion tracking for form submissions (10 minutes). Go to Tools and Settings, then Conversions, then New Conversion Action. Select Website, enter your thank-you page URL, and save.

Submit your own form to verify it works.

Step 2: Google Ads call tracking with forwarding numbers (10 minutes). In the same Conversions section, add a Phone Call conversion action. Google will give you a forwarding number that tracks calls from your ads.

Set the minimum call duration to 60 seconds to filter out junk calls.

Step 3: Microsoft Clarity on your landing pages (10 minutes). Create a free Clarity account, add the tracking script to your site, and let it run. Within 24 hours you’ll have session recordings showing exactly how paid visitors interact with your pages.

Next week: add CallRail for keyword-level call attribution ($50 per month). This gives you the full picture - which keywords drive which calls, how long each call lasted, and whether the call resulted in a booked job.

Thirty minutes of setup can save you thousands per month in wasted ad spend. You’re already paying for the clicks. Start tracking which ones actually pay you back.

Learn more about tracking PPC leads that don’t convert and building a conversion tracking stack. For a complete overview of what tools to use, see our website tracking tools guide for home service companies and learn why your website traffic might not be converting.