The same ad budget in October as in July

Most contractor ads accounts I open have a number in them that has not moved since the day the account was built. It is the daily budget, it is usually a round figure like $50 or $75, and it is the same on August 4 as it is on November 12.

That is not a budget. It is a thermostat set to a single temperature for the whole year.

What a flat daily budget does on a hot day

Google spends your budget against demand. On a day with a heat wave, searches for ac repair near me in your county can run several times a normal Tuesday, and all of your competitors are bidding into the same auction. Clicks cost more and they arrive faster.

Google’s own documentation says a campaign can spend up to twice your average daily budget on a single day, with the monthly total capped at your daily budget multiplied by 30.4. So there is some automatic flex built in. On a real heat wave it is nowhere near enough. The campaign hits its ceiling, the ads stop serving, and the rest of the afternoon belongs to somebody else.

What that costs you is not the clicks you did not buy. It is that a call at 2pm on a 96 degree day is the most valuable call your business gets all year. The system is already down, the customer is not price shopping, and a fair share of those repair calls turn into a replacement quote.

Being switched off for 6 hours in January costs almost nothing. Being switched off for 6 hours on the first real heat wave costs you the best day of your year.

Find your real season in your own data first

Do not take a seasonality chart off the internet. Coastal North Carolina does not run on the same calendar as Ohio, and your book does not run on the same calendar as the company across town that only does commercial.

Pull 2 or 3 years of completed jobs out of your CRM or your accounting software. You want 3 columns: date, job type, revenue. Then:

• Group by week of the year, not by month. Months hide the thing you are looking for. A season turns on inside a week, and a monthly total averages that away.
• Split repair from replacement from maintenance. They have different seasons. Repair spikes with the weather. Replacement lags repair by 1 to 3 weeks, because a dead system becomes a quote, then a decision, then an install.
• Find the 3 things that matter: the week volume first steps up, the 6 to 8 weeks that carry your peak, and the trough weeks where the phone genuinely goes quiet.

Do the same for heating. Most books on this coast have 2 peaks with unequal weight, and the fall one arrives faster than people expect once the first cold snap lands.

What you end up with is a 52 line list of what your business actually does. That list, not a guess, is what a budget calendar gets built from.

The column that proves you got buried

Google Ads will tell you exactly how often you were switched off for lack of money, and almost nobody looks at it.

The metric is Search lost IS (budget), short for search lost impression share due to budget. It is the share of the time your ad could have shown and did not, purely because the campaign was out of money. It is not in the default columns. You add it: open the campaigns table, Columns, Modify columns, Competitive metrics, tick it, apply. Google moves the interface around, so if those menu names have changed, search the column picker for lost IS.

Then set the date range to last summer and segment the view by day. You get a row per day with a percentage on it. Every day sitting at 30 or 40 or 60 percent is a day you paid for half a day of advertising in the middle of your season.

There are 2 other places that show the same thing faster. A campaign that runs out of money carries a Limited by budget status label. And the time reports (Reports, Predefined reports, Time, then Hour of day and Day of week) will show clicks collapsing at the same hour every afternoon, which is the shape of a budget running dry rather than of customers going away.

Setting the budget around a heat wave

The forecast is public and it runs 7 days out. Use it.

• Read the 7 day forecast every Sunday night. It takes 4 minutes. You are looking for the first day that jumps 8 or 10 degrees above the week around it, and for any run of 3 or more days above whatever your local pain threshold is.
• Raise the daily budget the day before, not the morning of. Volume starts climbing the evening before a hot day, and the morning calls are the ones that get booked for that same afternoon.
• Raise it far enough to matter. If lost IS to budget on comparable days last year was 40 percent, a 10 percent bump fixes nothing.
• Work the arithmetic on your own numbers. If a booked repair costs you $70 in clicks, you close 4 out of 5 of the calls you answer, a repair ticket averages $450, and 1 in 6 turns into a replacement quote, then you can answer what one more call is worth and how far the budget can go before it stops paying. Those are placeholder figures. Yours are in your own invoices.
• Put the money back down afterwards. A budget that went up for a heat wave and never came back down is the other half of this same problem.

Bid adjustments, and when they are ignored

On manual CPC the classic adjustments still apply: ad schedule (bid up from 7am to 11am, when the emergency calls come in), device (mobile is where a dead AC gets searched), and location.

On Smart Bidding, which now covers most accounts (Maximize Conversions, Target CPA, Maximize Conversion Value), most of those manual adjustments are ignored. Setting them and feeling productive is worse than not setting them, because you believe a lever is connected when it is not. The tool built for this case is seasonality adjustments, under Tools, Bid strategies, Advanced controls. You tell Google that for a defined window you expect conversion rate to be higher than normal, and by how much. Google’s guidance is that it is for short, known events, on the order of 1 to 7 days. A heat wave is exactly that shape. A whole summer is not: across a season the bid strategy learns on its own, and the thing you change is the budget.

What to do with the shoulder months

The usual April and October mistake is going to zero. That costs you twice. You lose the work that is genuinely being bought in those months, and on Smart Bidding you starve the strategy of the conversion data it needs to be any good when the season turns.

Change what you are buying instead.

• Swap the keyword set. Emergency intent terms are expensive and thin in October. Planned terms are cheaper and they are what people actually type in the shoulder: tune up, maintenance, inspection, service plan, and in the fall, heating and furnace terms before the first cold night rather than after it.
• Sell the maintenance agreement, not the tune up. A tune up is a single low ticket transaction. An agreement is a list of addresses you are allowed to call in July. That list is the cheapest lead source you will ever have, because you paid for it in October.
• Price the shoulder offer against what a member is worth. You can lose money on the first visit if you know what a plan member returns over 2 or 3 years. You cannot know that unless you have gone back through your own book and counted, so do that before you set the price.
• Run the fall changeover on a date, not a feeling. Take the week from your own data where heating calls historically start, and have the heating campaigns, the budget and the landing page live 10 days ahead of it.
• Keep a floor under the emergency campaign. Do not pause it. Systems still die in November. A small daily budget keeps you present and keeps the conversion data flowing.

The part worth remembering

An HVAC business does not earn evenly across the year, so an account that spends evenly across the year is guaranteed to be wrong twice: short in July, long in October. Neither version announces itself. The July one looks like a normal busy week, and you never hear about the calls that went somewhere else. The October one looks like advertising that does not work.

The fix is not clever bidding. It is a budget shaped like your own booking calendar, which you already have, sitting in a system you already pay for.

Written by Matt Pulliam, Southern Standard Systems. Wilmington, NC.