HVAC lead sources in Australia, ranked by cost per booked quote (2026)

Every installer we talk to has a view on HVAC lead sources. One swears by hipages. Another says Google Ads is a money pit. A third gets all his work from builders and has never paid for a lead. They are all partly right, because they are measuring different things.

This post ranks seven lead sources for Australian air conditioning businesses by the only two things that decide whether a channel is worth keeping: what it costs to get a qualified homeowner booked into your diary, and how much of the pipeline you control. We have not invented any cost per lead benchmarks. Where we use numbers, they are our published planning assumptions, labelled as such, and you should replace them with your own.

What is the right way to rank HVAC lead sources?

Rank HVAC lead sources by cost per booked quote, not cost per lead, then by control. A cheap lead that three other installers also ring, or that never books a visit, is expensive. A source you own, where the enquiry, the data and the follow-up stay with you, is worth more than one you rent.

A booked quote is a qualified homeowner booked in for an in-home quote, in your diary, with a time. Cost per booked quote is everything a source cost you in a month (ad spend, subscriptions, fees) divided by the booked quotes it produced. It is the number we report to clients every week, and we explain the full chain in what HVAC leads really cost in Australia.

Control is the second test. Ask four questions of any source:

1. Is the enquiry exclusive to you, or shared with competitors?
2. Can you change the offer, the suburbs and the budget yourself, this week?
3. Do you keep the data, the audience and the history if you stop paying?
4. Can you turn it up in October and down in June?

A source that scores badly on control can still be worth running. You just should not build the business on it.

Which HVAC lead sources are available to Australian installers?

Seven sources cover almost all residential aircon work in Australia: your existing customer and service base, referrals, Google Business Profile and SEO, Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram, Google Search ads, shared lead marketplaces such as hipages, and Google Local Services Ads, which Google does not currently offer in Australia.

Builder and developer work is a separate business with its own economics, so we have left it out. So have letterbox drops and radio, which some installers use for brand but which are hard to track to a booked quote.

How do the main lead sources compare?

The table below is our judgment, not measured data. Speed to start is how fast the first enquiry arrives. Exclusivity is whether the homeowner is talking only to you. Control covers offer, area, budget and data. Fit columns say how well the source matches ducted installs and breakdown repairs.

Two things stand out. The cheapest sources are the ones you cannot scale. And the sources you can scale split cleanly by job type: Meta for considered purchases, Google Search for urgent ones.

Why is your existing customer base the cheapest lead source?

Your past customers already trust you, already have your number and already have a system that will need servicing, adding to or replacing. Reaching them costs an SMS or an email, not an auction. Per booked quote, nothing else comes close, but the volume is capped by how many customers you have.

Most installers with a few hundred past jobs are sitting on a list they never contact. A service reminder every autumn and spring, a note to single-split customers about adding a room, and a message to anyone whose system is past ten years old will produce booked visits for close to nothing.

This is also the heart of Off-Peak Fill, our module for winter and the shoulder months: service and maintenance offers, heating checks and pre-summer install slots, sent to people who already know you. It keeps vans moving when new ducted enquiries slow down.

Are referrals a reliable HVAC lead source?

Referrals produce the warmest booked quotes you will ever get, and they cost almost nothing. They are not reliable. You cannot decide to get twelve more next month, and they dry up if your install volume drops. Treat them as a bonus you earn with good work, not a plan.

You can make them a little more likely. Ask at handover, when the house is cool and the homeowner is happy. Leave a card on the indoor unit. Send a text a week later asking for a Google review, which also feeds your Google Business Profile. None of it scales like paid media, and that is fine.

How good are Google Business Profile and SEO for aircon leads?

Google Business Profile and organic search give you calls from homeowners who found you, often for repairs and service, at no cost per click. They are slow to build, depend heavily on reviews and proximity, and you cannot turn them up for summer. They are worth doing for every installer, alongside a channel you can control.

Your profile needs your real service area, real photos of your vans and installs, a steady stream of reviews and answers to the questions homeowners ask. Suburb pages on your site help when they are genuinely local, not the same page with the suburb name swapped.

The catch for ducted work is that a lot of people researching a $10,500 to $16,500 system (our Sydney planning range for a 3 to 4 bedroom install) are not searching yet. They are thinking. Organic search catches them late, often after they have already asked someone else.

Why do Meta ads rank well for ducted air conditioning?

Meta ads reach homeowners in your suburbs while they are still thinking about a ducted or multi-head system, before they start collecting quotes. With a real offer, a landing page and a qualifier, the enquiry is exclusive to you and the whole pipeline sits in accounts you own. They work poorly for urgent breakdowns.

The weakness of Meta is that enquiries start colder than search. Someone scrolling past your ad on a Sunday night is not ringing three installers. That is why the ad is only the first step. The enquiry goes through a six-question qualifier (property type, current system, install or repair, urgency, budget, ownership), gets an SMS and call inside 60 seconds, and gets booked straight into your diary. That is the HVAC Profit Machine, and it is how we run lead generation for HVAC businesses, with Meta and Google Search feeding the same qualifier.

Those numbers are assumptions we use for planning, to be replaced with a client's real data within the first month. We have no clients yet, so we will not pretend otherwise. What matters is the shape: a cost per booked quote you can see, weekly, and compare against the other sources in this table.

When do Google Search ads beat Meta for HVAC?

Google Search ads win when the homeowner already knows they need someone now: a split that has stopped cooling in a heatwave, a ducted system throwing an error code, a service before selling the house. Intent is high, so booking rates are good. The trade-off is a competitive auction where the homeowner is often ringing several installers at once.

Search is strong on control. You set the suburbs, the budget and the keywords, and the data stays in your account. It is less exclusive in practice, because a homeowner who searches "aircon repair near me" usually calls two or three businesses from the same page. Speed of reply decides who gets the job.

For ducted, search tends to catch people at the comparison stage. It still works, but you are competing on price and availability rather than being the first conversation. That is why we run both: Meta creates demand from homeowners thinking about ducted before they search, and Google Search ads for HVAC catch people searching now, especially breakdowns in a heatwave. From December to February we weight the budget towards Google. We compare the two properly in Google Ads vs Facebook ads for HVAC.

Are marketplaces like hipages worth it for air conditioning installers?

Marketplaces start fast and need no marketing skill, which is why so many installers use them. The cost is control: leads are usually shared, pricing is set by the platform and changes with demand, and the homeowner relationship starts on someone else's app. They suit filling gaps more than building a ducted pipeline.

hipages is the biggest example, so it is worth being precise about how it works, using its own pages. hipages says that "no more than three tradies can accept a job lead, unless both the homeowner and tradie agree on waitlisting" (hipages FAQs). Its comparison page describes the platform as designed so that three businesses quote on each job (hipages). It also mentions "maximum 1 accept" leads, limited to specific categories.

Leads are paid for with credits that come with a monthly subscription. hipages says the number of credits for a lead depends on trade category, location, supply and demand and job size, and can change daily, weekly or monthly. It does not publish a credit price per aircon lead, so we will not guess one.

The bigger cost is what you do not keep. If you stop paying, the flow stops, and nothing you spent has built an audience, a pixel history or a list of homeowners in your area. We go through the numbers in hipages vs building your own pipeline.

What about Google Local Services Ads in Australia?

Google Local Services Ads are pay-per-lead listings with a Google Verified badge that sit above normal search ads. HVAC is a supported category, but Google's own help centre only lists country versions for the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom and several European countries. Australia is not one of them.

We checked Google's Local Services help page in September 2026 (Google Local Services Help). If you read an article recommending LSA for Australian aircon installers, it was probably written for the US market. If Google launches it here, it will be worth testing, because it charges per lead rather than per click in the markets where it runs.

How should an installer mix lead sources?

Use your customer base and referrals as the cheap floor, keep your Google Business Profile strong, and run paid channels you control that match the jobs you want more of. For ducted and multi-head, Meta finds homeowners early and Google Search catches them when they search. Keep marketplaces as a top-up, not the foundation.

A sensible order of work for a 3 to 12 van installer:

1. This week: contact your past customer list with a service or upgrade offer. It costs almost nothing.
2. This month: tidy your Google Business Profile, ask every recent customer for a review, and fix how fast the phone gets answered.
3. Next: run paid channels you control, such as Meta and Google Search, properly for at least 90 days, with a qualifier and a 60-second reply.
4. Always: track every enquiry by source to booked quote and won job. Without that, you are ranking channels on gut feel.

On the NSW side, the Energy Savings Scheme discount comes off the quote upfront, indicatively up to $550 for a new 6kW system and up to $560 replacing an old unit with a 6kW split, with no current closing date (NSW Climate and Energy Action). It is one of the few offers that works across every paid source above, if you are set up to provide it.

If you are working out which mix fits your area, our page on HVAC marketing in Sydney covers how the suburbs differ and which territories are still open.

Sam

Co-founder. Audits, strategy and media buying

Sam runs every audit and buys every ad. Before going HVAC-only, he ran Scale Theory as a performance marketing agency: SEO, Meta and Google ads, CRM automation.

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