A Denver HVAC contractor with seasonal demand and rising lead costs
A Denver, Colorado-based residential HVAC contractor serving the Denver metro and Front Range communities. Founded in 2008 with 24 service technicians and $11.4 million in annual revenue. The company had built strong reputation but had seen cost per service call lead climb from $42 in 2021 to $87 by mid-2025, driven by paid search competition and rising customer acquisition costs across home services categories.
Why service call leads kept getting more expensive
Three issues drove cost per lead upward. First, the Google Ads account was running broad-matched campaigns competing with home services aggregators like HomeAdvisor and Angi, who could outspend the local contractor on most terms. Second, the contractor was not registered with Google Local Services Ads, which would have given them preferred placement in the local services results that increasingly dominated home services searches. Third, the company had no email infrastructure to extract repeat business from existing customers, so every season required acquiring fresh leads rather than reactivating prior customers.
What we built across local search, Local Services, and dispatch
We restructured Google Ads with hyper-local campaigns targeting specific neighborhoods (Capitol Hill, Highland, LoDo, Cherry Creek, Wash Park, Stapleton, Aurora, Lakewood, Centennial) with neighborhood-named landing pages and emergency service hour adjustments. We registered the company with Google Local Services Ads and worked through the Google Guaranteed verification process. We rebuilt the Google Business Profile with weekly posts, response cadence on reviews, and seasonal content covering tune-up offers and emergency response capacity. We launched an email and SMS program with 7 streams covering seasonal tune-up reminders, post-service follow-up, anniversary year service prompts, referral program activation, emergency hour notifications, weather-event preparedness reminders, and reactivation for customers who had not used the company in 18 plus months. On the software side, our engineering team built a custom dispatch dashboard that integrated the company's scheduling system with Google Ads, Google Local Services, and the website inquiry forms. The dashboard surfaced real-time technician availability, automatically routed leads to the next available appropriate technician, and surfaced lead source performance to the operations team in real time.
Seven-month results across cost per call, revenue, and repeat
By month 7, cost per service call lead dropped to $24, down from $87 at the start. Monthly service calls grew from 1,840 to 4,200. Annual revenue trajectory grew by approximately $4.6 million from the new call volume. Google Local Services Ads delivered approximately 38% of the new call volume at the lowest cost per lead in the channel mix. Repeat customer call share grew from 18% to 47% of total monthly calls because the email and SMS program reactivated dormant customers. Average customer lifetime value grew by approximately $620 because the company captured tune-up and maintenance work that had previously gone to competitors. The company hired 4 additional service technicians during the engagement, funded by the new revenue.
How the dispatch dashboard changed daily operations
The custom dispatch dashboard became the daily operating tool for the company. The operations team used it to make routing decisions, the marketing team used it to evaluate channel performance, and the owner used it to track real-time business health across all locations. The company's existing field service software remained the system of record for jobs, but the dashboard sat on top of it as the daily operational view.