Google Ads for air duct cleaning: budgets, the campaigns that book jobs, and the ones that feed the $49 crowd
What a duct cleaning call really costs on Google, how to split Local Services Ads and Search, which terms to bid on and which to block, and the settings that keep you out of the coupon auction.
Google Ads in this trade is a strange auction. You are bidding against companies whose entire business model is a $49 ad and an $800 invoice, and they can afford to pay more per click than you because they are not planning to honor the price. If you walk into the auction on their terms, you lose. If you build the account around homeowners who are specifically trying to avoid them, you win cheaply. This guide is the second approach.
It assumes someone answers your phone during the hours the ads run. If that is not true yet, read the missed calls guide first.
Start with Local Services Ads
Air duct cleaning is an eligible category for Local Services Ads in most of the US. LSAs sit above the regular ads, show the Google Guaranteed badge, and charge per lead rather than per click. In mid-size metros a duct cleaning LSA lead runs $20 to $55. You can dispute leads that were out of area, a wrong number, or a service you do not offer.
Approval needs a background check, your business license where your state requires one, and a liability certificate. Plan on two to four weeks. Once live, your rank is driven by review count and rating, how fast you answer, and your responsiveness score. Only 13.1% of duct cleaners have 100 or more reviews, and that count shows right on the ad, so the reviews guide pays twice here.
Set the weekly budget to roughly five leads to start. At $40 a lead that is $200 a week. If you book half and your average ticket is $450, the math is settled inside a month.
The badge itself is worth something extra in this trade. A homeowner who read about bait-and-switch companies sees "Google Guaranteed" and relaxes.
Search: bid on the fear, not the coupon
Run Search as a separate campaign with exact and phrase match only. Broad match on "duct cleaning" buys you "duct cleaning cost," "duct cleaning scam," "is duct cleaning worth it," and "duct cleaning machine rental," plus every $49 shopper in the county.
Three ad groups, kept apart because their value differs:
- Whole-house intent: air duct cleaning near me, air duct cleaning [city], HVAC duct cleaning, duct cleaning company. Clicks run $6 to $18 in most metros. Cost per tracked call lands between $30 and $70.
- Dryer vent: dryer vent cleaning near me, dryer vent cleaning [city], clogged dryer vent. Clicks $4 to $12, calls $20 to $45. Smaller ticket, easier close, and the best first job in the home.
- Trust terms: honest duct cleaning, NADCA certified duct cleaning, duct cleaning reviews [city], licensed duct cleaning. Low volume, cheap, and these are the exact people your reviews were written for.
Negative keyword list on day one: $49, 49, coupon, groupon, cheap, free, diy, rental, machine, how to, scam, jobs, salary, training, equipment, supply, commercial if you do not do it, and the names of the national coupon brands in your market.
Write the ads to pre-empt the objection. Headline examples: "Price on the phone is the price at the door," "Truck-mounted vacuum, before and after photos," "Whole house from $395." A price in the headline filters out the coupon shopper and raises your click-to-call rate with everyone else.
Budget and schedule
For a one to two truck company, $1,200 to $2,500 a month across LSA and Search is a real test. Under $600 you will not see enough calls to judge anything. Start about 55% LSA and 45% Search, then move money toward booked jobs, not cheaper clicks.
Schedule the ads to your answering hours. 25% of listings claim 24-hour availability; a $14 click at 11 p.m. that rings a voicemail is pure waste. Saturday is worth running: 56.8% of competitors list Saturday hours, and homeowners book duct cleaning for days they are home.
Raise bids 20% to 30% in the two seasonal windows: late March through May when allergy searches climb, and mid-September through early November before furnaces come on. Pull back in January and February unless you are running a dryer vent push.
Landing pages and tracking
Send whole-house traffic to a whole-house page with a price range, your method, five photos and tap-to-call above the fold. Send dryer vent traffic to a dryer vent page. Never send ads to the home page. The website essentials guide covers what those pages need.
Turn on call tracking with recording. Count a conversion when a call lasts 60 seconds or more. Then listen to ten calls a week. The two most common problems we hear are a phone script that does not give a price range (the caller hangs up and dials the coupon company to compare) and a dispatcher who says "we will call you back" on a Saturday.
What wastes money in this category
Performance Max as the first campaign. With no conversion history it finds cheap Display clicks on recipe sites and reports them as success.
Bidding on "duct cleaning cost." The searcher is price-shopping and the click is expensive. Answer the question on your website instead and let organic search bring them.
Running the same ad copy as the coupon companies. If your headline says "Spring special" you have entered their auction and will pay their prices for their customers.
Letting the account run with no negatives. Check the search terms report every week for the first two months, then every two weeks.
Reading the numbers after 30 days
Four metrics: cost per tracked call, booked rate, cost per booked job, and revenue per booked job. If cost per booked job is under 15% of your average ticket, raise budget 20% and look again in two weeks. If it is over 30%, the problem is almost always the phone or the keyword list, not the bid.
Frequently asked
Can I run Google Ads myself? Yes, if you will spend an hour a week in the search terms report and listen to calls. Most owners stop doing that by week six and the account drifts toward the coupon auction.
Do I need a website for LSA? No, but leads convert better when they can check you out, and 35.1% of duct cleaners have no site listed. Companies with a site have a median of 18 reviews against 2 without.
How long until it works? LSA can produce a lead in the first week. Search needs about 30 days and 40 to 50 clicks per ad group before the numbers mean anything.
Google Ads and LSA setup are included in the free 14-day trial. The account is built in your name and stays yours. Text or call (385) 486-5536.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, air duct cleaning companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor