Sterling Plumbing & Heating serves Regina and Winnipeg with plumbing, heating and air conditioning, from furnace and AC installs to water heaters and SterlingCare maintenance plans.
When they came to AdEasy in the fall of 2022, they’d fired two agencies in two years, their website had vanished from Google, and paid ads were the only thing keeping the phones ringing. Over the next 18 months we built them a new website and ran their marketing in both cities.
Google Ads leads in October 2023, at about $29 each against a $35 goal
Cities, Regina and Winnipeg, on one new website and one set of campaigns
Phone calls tracked in CallRail in June 2023
Homeowners reached by the AC Fact or Fiction campaign for about $2,500
When Sterling’s previous agency launched a new website in August 2022, nobody told Google about it. Their organic rankings disappeared, and paid ads became the only source of online leads. Those ads weren’t working either. Of 27 tracked leads, only 8 were real customers, and some calls were coming from other provinces.
HVAC makes it harder. Demand swings with the weather: air conditioning in summer, furnaces in fall and winter, water heaters all year. Marketing that runs the same message twelve months a year wastes money in at least two seasons.
We started by trying to fix the site Sterling already had. Within a few weeks it was clear that every new page would have to be hand-coded into a platform we couldn’t control, and we couldn’t promise it would hold up.
So in November 2022 we recommended starting over, even though it meant holding the Google Ads launch back a few weeks. We built Sterling a new Webflow website, launched in early 2023, with a page for each service and room to grow by city.
Furnaces, air conditioning, water heaters, plumbing and SterlingCare plans, each with its own page for ads to send people to.
The booking form sends requests straight into ServiceTitan, Sterling’s job system, so the office sees them right away.
Each ad carries its own tracking code, so a booking shows which campaign it came from.
Our onboarding audit scored Sterling’s website, analytics and lead handling at 68%, “acceptable, but only barely.” We moved the hosting, fixed the security warnings, then built a new Webflow site around one clear action: book an appointment.
Separate Google campaigns for furnaces, air conditioning and water heaters in Regina and Winnipeg, so each one could scale up in its season and pull back out of it. Microsoft Ads picked up searches Google missed.
Every season had an offer: SaskEnergy rebates on new furnaces, a free smart thermostat with new equipment or a SterlingCare plan, furnace and maintenance specials by mail with a QR code to a matching landing page, and AC maintenance and rentals in the summer.
Our AC Fact or Fiction campaign on Facebook and Instagram took on the excuses homeowners give themselves and showed that renting a new AC is an affordable way to replace an aging unit.
Sterling’s goal for Google Ads was a lead for $35 or less, on about $3,000 a month. By the fall of 2023 we were there: 88 leads at about $32 each in September, then 107 at about $29 in October.
Earlier in the summer, in June 2023, Google Ads brought in 53 leads at about $56 each, and CallRail tracked 186 phone calls. Sterling’s ads showed at the top of the page 91% of the time, and across Google, Microsoft and Meta the campaigns earned more than 286,000 impressions on about $3,400 in ad spend.
The service-line structure did its job: water heaters (23 leads) and air conditioning (16 leads) were the top campaigns that month.
cost per Google Ads lead in October 2023, under the $35 goal
Google Ads leads in October 2023, up from 88 in September
phone calls tracked in CallRail in June 2023
impressions across Google, Microsoft and Meta in June 2023
| Month | Ad spend | Leads | Cost per lead |
|---|---|---|---|
| June 2023 | ~$2,960 | 53 | ~$56 |
| September 2023 | $2,792 | 88 | ~$32 |
| October 2023 | $3,117 | 107 | ~$29 |
AC installs, maintenance and rentals, backed by AC Fact or Fiction on Facebook and Instagram.
Furnace and maintenance specials by mail, with a QR code to a matching landing page, plus the free smart thermostat offer with new equipment or a SterlingCare plan.
An always-on campaign for the work that doesn’t wait for the weather.
And the website was back in the game. Our September 2023 analytics review showed organic search producing leads again: 33 conversions from organic search, alongside 55 from Google Ads.
Source: Sterling’s June 2023 monthly report (Google Ads, Microsoft Ads, Meta and CallRail), AdEasy’s September 2023 analytics review and our September and October 2023 campaign review. Ad spend is media only. June figures are Google Ads conversions from the monthly report. September and October are calls tracked in CallRail plus website form fills from Google Ads, so the two methods are close but not identical.
Our AC Fact or Fiction campaign on Facebook and Instagram took on the excuses homeowners give themselves, like “My A/C doesn’t need annual maintenance,” and showed that renting a new AC is an affordable way to replace an aging unit.
It reached more than 300,000 homeowners in Regina and Winnipeg and drove 3,400 visits to Sterling’s website, about $0.74 a click on roughly $2,500.
Read the AC Fact or Fiction Story →homeowners reached
visits to Sterling’s website
average cost per click
in ad spend
Find out what’s working, where your marketing could be missing opportunities, and what to improve first.
Before we meet, we’ll research your website, Google presence, reviews and other publicly visible marketing to identify strengths and potential gaps.
We’ll discuss your business goals and review eight key marketing systems, from attracting the right customers to turning leads into booked jobs.
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