A paid-media operating manual for commercial HVAC owners who want to stop trusting vanity reports and start reallocating dollars based on booked strong-fit gross margin.
Key Takeaway: This is not a broad marketing return-on-investment lecture. It is a practical paid-channel audit that shows what to keep, fix, or cut using cost per booked strong-fit job and cost per gross margin dollar.
It is Sunday night at the kitchen table. The house is quiet in that end-of-week way that makes numbers feel louder. You have a stack of checks and a laptop open to your accounting software.
Parts vendors.
Fuel cards.
Payroll processing.
Insurance.
Then you hit the one that makes you pause.
Digital Marketing Partners LLC: 8,400
You open the job board from last month on your phone.
Three solid retrofit jobs.
A bunch of service calls.
Not nearly enough work to feel good about that number.
You text your partner:
“Do we actually know what this is buying us?”
They reply:
“Agency said last month was great. More clicks. More impressions.”
You stare at the line item again. Part of you wants to trust it. Part of you wants to cut it. The smarter part knows neither move is the point. It is time to find out for yourself.
This post is how you do that without becoming a marketing hobbyist. You are not here to learn new jargon. You are here to decide what deserves your next dollar.
If you need the baseline first, start with Is My Marketing Actually Working? to define “working” across fit, conversion, and profit before you touch budgets.
Reality
An ad spend audit is not another vendor report. It is you walking the money from your bank account to a specific paid channel, to specific booked jobs, to the gross margin that actually stuck.
Most owners skip this because the spreadsheets look annoying. Most vendors avoid this because the truth is uncomfortable.
Fix It
Use one simple rule. If a channel cannot be tied to:
It does not get to call itself a growth engine. It is just a line item with good vibes.
Pro Move
Make the audit an autopsy, not a trial. You are not trying to punish whoever approved last year’s spend. You are trying to find the leak so you can stop paying for it.
Treat paid marketing like a truck that has been “running rough.” You do not yell at the engine. You open the hood.
Quick Win
Write this sentence at the top of your next marketing meeting agenda.
“Show me which specific jobs this channel helped us book and the gross margin from those jobs.”
If the room goes quiet, you already learned something.
Reality
Most shops do not know their true paid spend. They know Google Ads. They forget the lead platforms. They ignore the agency retainers. They definitely forget the “small” experiments that became permanent.
The channel you trust most is often the one you audit least. Google gets scrutinized because the invoice is obvious. The retainer gets a pass because it sounds like partnership. Know this: Partnership without accountability is just rent.
Fix It
Pull three to six months of all paid demand costs in one list:
Do not optimize yet. Just get the full picture.
For a big picture view on why spend keeps shifting and why attribution gets messy, the Interactive Advertising Bureau and PricewaterhouseCoopers Internet Ad Revenue Report is a credible outside anchor.
Pro Move
Group spend by intent level, not by vendor.
If low intent spend is more than you would tolerate in a slow month, you will feel it in your cash before you see it in your dashboards.
Quick Win
Open your last three months of bank statements. Search these words:
“ads”
“marketing”
“lead”
“agency”
Make a list of every charge you forgot existed. That list is usually where the easiest cuts live.
Reality
Vendors love cost per lead. Your business runs on cost per booked strong-fit job. A cheap bad lead is still expensive.
Fix It
For each paid channel, write five numbers.
Then calculate three ratios.
Example snapshot:
Google Ads (Search)
Ratios:
Lead Platform (Marketplace)
Ratios:
Now you can see it. Google looks expensive per lead but survivable per booked margin dollar. The platform looks “cheap” until you trace it to booked work. This is the point of the audit.
Pro Move
Set your own thresholds based on what you can actually afford.
Here is one working example from a $12M commercial shop:
Your numbers will differ based on overhead and crew capacity. The point is not to copy these thresholds. The point is to set yours before emotion takes over.
Ask yourself.
“What would I pay for one dollar of gross margin on work I actually want?”
Then make that your green line.
Worked math example:
Result. Yellow in this example.
Fix before you scale.
Quick Win
Pick your top three paid channels. Run this math for the last 90 days. Do not chase perfection. A directional answer is enough to decide what deserves attention next month.
To benchmark the local media mix reality, BIA’s local ad spend forecast analysis is a strong reference point for where dollars are moving.
Reality
Most owners only cut spend when they feel scared. That is too late.
Most shops cut the wrong channels when they panic. They slash the expensive, slow-converting channel that books retrofits. They keep the cheap, fast-converting channel that books low-value service calls.
Six months later they wonder why they are busy but not profitable.
This is also why modern measurement is moving toward “multiple methods, one truth.” Google’s overview of rethinking Return on Investment with AI-powered measurement is a clean explanation of why single-source attribution breaks in real buyer journeys.
Fix It
Make one of three calls per channel.
I. Keep and consider scaling:
II. Fix
III. Cut or shrink
Pro Move
Separate channel problems from shop problems.
Sometimes a channel looks red because your intake is leaking. If your response time and call handling are loose, you will misdiagnose paid spend as the villain. You are isolating the paid engine first, then checking whether your front door is killing good demand.
Quick Win
For any “Fix” channel, write one sentence that defines the fix. Then add one test you can launch this week.
Example Fix Sentence:
“We will tighten Google Ads to buildings over 50,000 square feet in our core counties.”
This Week’s Test:
If you cannot write both the sentence and the test, you do not know what to fix yet.
Reality
Paid marketing fails quietly. It does not explode. It drifts. The creative gets stale. The targeting gets lazy. The agency rotates a junior person onto your account. You keep paying.
Your agency wants monthly reviews. You need weekly kill rules. The difference is who controls the timeline of truth.
Fix It
Adopt a simple monthly cadence.
No heroics. Just discipline.
Pro Move
Make Week 1 real, not theoretical. Pull your dashboard or have your agency send you:
Then ask:
Document one insight per channel, even if it is blunt.
“Search is still earning its spot.”
“Marketplace is dying quietly.”
“Retargeting is running because no one owns it.”
Pro Move
Build kill rules before you launch a new test.
Examples:
One shop’s real kill rule:
“We ran Facebook ads for six months targeting ‘commercial building owners.’ Cost per lead looked great at $42. But when we tracked it honestly, only 2 of 63 leads were strong-fit. Both ghosted after the first call.
Our kill rule became: ‘If a channel cannot produce 1 booked strong-fit job per $2,000 spent in 90 days, we reallocate that budget to search.’
We cut Facebook. Put the money into Google. Booked three retrofits in the next 60 days.”
Kill rules do not make you cynical. They make you free.
Quick Win
Pick one paid channel you suspect is coasting.
Cut its budget by 20 percent for the next 30 days. If your booked strong-fit jobs do not move, you just found your easiest reallocation opportunity.
This is not a job mix strategy post. This is about paid dollars and the discipline to protect them.
If a channel cannot show you booked strong-fit gross margin at a cost you would proudly pay again, you are not investing. You are donating.
The goal is not to become more aggressive with ads. The goal is to become harder to fool.
This audit showed which channels survive contact with booked margin. The next move is not a new platform. It is a clean decision.
If your situation looks like this, spend is up but margin is not, ground the system first with Is My Marketing Actually Working?. Make sure you are measuring the whole demand engine, not just the loudest channel.
Then choose the right fix:
• Am I Targeting the Wrong Job Types? if the jobs booking are profitable but wrong.
• Why Aren’t Calls Turning Into Jobs? if intake is killing good leads.
• Why Are Our Leads Weak: My Strategy Or Our Lead System if the problem is strategy and follow-through, not one channel.
Use this Lead Quality Check to track cost per booked strong-fit job by channel over time. When you want this to turn into a reallocation plan that sticks, request your Customer Leads Workplan.
Here are the top toolkits HVAC owners are reading, using, and sharing to work smarter every week.
Stop chasing vanity clicks. Track what actually converts to booked jobs and margin so you know what's working and what's just noise.
Fix the first 60 seconds with two-lane intake, four-question qualification, and booked next steps so good leads stop dying in your own phone system.
Your phones ring, but the leads feel wrong. Separate a targeting problem from a follow-through problem, then fix the real bottleneck.
Stop stuffing your calendar with C-work. Run the A/B/C job audit to protect crew time and margin from the jobs that quietly drain both.
No spam. Get real advice and proven tactics to win more jobs and keep more profit.
“This is the stuff no one tells you. We’re making more with less stress.”
— Louis, Texas
