How much should an air conditioning business spend on marketing?

The most common answer to "how much should I spend on marketing" is a percentage of revenue. It sounds sensible and it is easy to work out. It is also nearly useless for an air conditioning business, because it tells you nothing about how many ducted jobs the money will produce.

This post sets out the method we use instead: start with the jobs you want, work backwards to the booked quotes you need, then to the spend. We use our published planning assumptions for the worked examples. They are assumptions to be replaced with your real numbers, not results from clients. We do not have clients yet, and we will not pretend we do.

How much should an air conditioning business spend on marketing?

Spend whatever it takes to book enough qualified quotes to hit your job target, as long as the all-in cost per booked quote stays well below what a booked quote is worth. For ducted work, that is usually a few thousand dollars a month of ad spend per territory, plus management.

The number comes out of three inputs you either know or can estimate:

1. Target jobs. How many ducted or multi-head installs a month do you want from paid marketing, on top of referrals and repeat work?
2. Close rate. What share of booked quotes do you win? Our planning range for exclusive, pre-qualified ducted quotes is 30 to 40%.
3. Cost per booked quote. What does it cost to put one qualified homeowner in your diary? Our planning assumption across Meta and Google Search is about $320 in ad spend, or about $550 all-in with our fee.

A booked quote is a qualified homeowner booked in for an in-home quote, in your diary, with a time. It is the unit this whole method runs on.

Why does working backwards from target jobs beat a percentage of revenue?

Working backwards ties the budget to an outcome you can check every week: booked quotes and jobs won. A percentage of revenue ties it to last year's turnover, which may have nothing to do with how many installs you want next month or how much crew capacity you have.

A percentage rule also treats all revenue the same. A $15,000 ducted install and a $1,500 split service count equally toward turnover but need very different marketing. If most of your growth is going to come from ducted and multi-head, budget for those jobs specifically.

How do you work out your HVAC marketing budget from target jobs?

Divide your target jobs by your close rate to get booked quotes needed. Multiply booked quotes by your cost per booked quote to get spend. Then compare the total with the gross profit those jobs bring in. If the gap is healthy, the budget is right. If not, change the target or fix the funnel.

Here is the method with our planning numbers for a Sydney installer who wants four extra ducted jobs a month.

At four jobs, the budget comes out at our minimum. That is not a coincidence. The $4,000 floor is roughly what one territory needs to produce enough booked quotes to reach a handful of ducted wins a month, under our planning assumptions.

What if you want 8 ducted jobs a month?

Double the target and the booked quotes double too: 20 to 27 a month at a 30 to 40% close rate. At $320 each, that is roughly $6,400 to $8,600 of ad spend. In practice, cost per booked quote tends to rise as you push harder into the same suburbs, because you run out of the easiest homeowners to reach. Plan for that by widening the area or adding a second offer, not just raising the daily budget.

What does each part of the budget pay for?

An HVAC marketing budget has three parts: ad spend paid to the platform, the fee for whoever runs it, and your own costs to answer and quote. Ad spend buys enquiries. The fee buys the system that turns enquiries into booked quotes. Your costs turn booked quotes into jobs. All three belong in the calculation.

Keep ad spend and fee separate in your head. An agency that bundles them into one number makes it hard to know what you are paying for clicks and what you are paying for work. Ours are split: you pay Meta and Google directly, in your own accounts, and you can see every dollar. The full offer, including how the first 90 days are paid, is on our pricing page.

How should an HVAC marketing budget change by season?

Spend follows demand and your diary. In Sydney, push new install spend in spring and early summer, hold steady through summer if the diary allows, and shift to heating, service and pre-summer booking offers in autumn and winter. Do not switch off entirely: a cold account costs more to restart.

This is the rough shape we plan for a Sydney installer. The split moves with the season: outside the peak we default to Meta $2,500 and Google $1,500, because Meta reaches homeowners thinking about ducted before they search. From December to February we flip it to Google $2,500 and Meta $1,500, because people search when systems break. It is a starting point, adjusted every month against booked quotes and crew capacity.

Off-Peak Fill is our module for winter and the shoulder months. It runs heating offers for reverse cycle systems, service and maintenance to your existing customers, and pre-summer install slots at a set date. The aim is simple: keep crews busy when ducted enquiries are slow, without dropping your ad accounts to zero. We lay out the month-by-month detail in our Sydney HVAC marketing calendar.

The NSW Energy Savings Scheme discount helps in the shoulder months too. It is an upfront discount on the quote, 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). Replacement offers in autumn give homeowners a reason to act before winter.

How much of the budget should go to ads versus the agency fee?

Judge the split on the all-in cost per booked quote, not on the ratio. At our minimum, $4,000 goes to Meta and Google and $3,000 to us, so the fee is a large share. As spend grows, the fee stays flat, so the all-in cost per booked quote falls as long as the ads keep performing.

This is the honest trade-off with any fixed monthly fee. At low spend, management is a big share of the total. That is why we do not take clients below $4,000 a month of combined spend: under that, the fee is too big a slice of too few booked quotes for the maths to work.

When should an HVAC business spend more on marketing?

Spend more when your cost per booked quote is comfortably below what a booked quote is worth, you have crews free to install more jobs, and your office still replies inside minutes. If crew capacity or reply speed is already stretched, more spend produces more unanswered enquiries, not more jobs.

Signs you are ready:

• The numbers hold. Four to eight weeks of cost per booked quote well under your expected gross profit per booked quote. Our planning range for ducted is $800 to $1,800.
• The diary has room. You can do the extra site visits within a week and the installs within your normal lead time.
• The reply is still fast. New enquiries still get an SMS and call inside a minute or two, even on the busiest day.
• Quotes get followed up. Every quote gets a nudge on days 1, 3 and 7. Without that, you pay for the booked quote and lose it at the last step.

Signs you should hold or spend less: crews booked out more than a few weeks, enquiries waiting hours for a reply, or cost per booked quote climbing for more than a month without a clear reason like a mild week or a public holiday.

What mistakes do installers make with their marketing budget?

The common mistakes are setting spend too low to learn anything, judging ads after a few days, switching everything off in winter, and counting only ad spend while ignoring fees and office time. Each one makes the budget look cheaper on paper and the cost per won job higher in reality.

Three more we see often:

1. Spreading thin. $4,000 split across Meta, Google, a marketplace, a directory and a local paper means none of them gets enough to work. We run two channels that do different jobs, Meta for homeowners thinking about ducted and Google Search for people searching now, and give each enough to show a pattern.
2. No tracking by source. If you cannot say which booked quotes came from which channel, you cannot decide where the next dollar goes. We compare sources properly in HVAC lead sources ranked by cost per booked quote.
3. Budgeting on cost per lead. A cheap lead that never books is not cheap. Our breakdown of what HVAC leads actually cost walks through the full chain.

How do you set your first-year HVAC marketing budget?

Pick a monthly job target, run the backwards maths with our planning numbers, set spend at or above the $4,000 combined floor, and commit to 90 days. After the first month, replace every assumption with your real cost per lead, pass rate, booking rate and close rate, then reset the budget on your own numbers.

The first 90 days are for learning, not for judging. Days 1 to 30 are setup and launch. Days 31 to 60 cut what does not work. Days 61 to 90 settle your real cost per booked quote. From there, budget month to month against the season and your diary.

If you are in Sydney, our Sydney HVAC marketing page covers how the suburbs differ and which service areas are still open to one installer each.

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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