Air con leads Victoria: cost per lead down 29.16%

Two seasons, one auction

Air conditioning in Victoria is a seasonal business fighting a year-round advertising market. The state runs a cooling season and a heating season, and the second is now as commercially important as the first — reverse-cycle systems and heat pumps turned what used to be a warm-weather trade into a business with two peaks and two troughs. Demand spikes and collapses with the weather. The advertising auction does not.

The customer is different from a plumbing customer in a way that changes everything downstream. Almost nobody buys an air conditioner in a panic. They compare brands, they compare capacities, they get two or three quotes, and the gap between the first search and the signed job can run to weeks. So the account is not judged on whether it catches somebody mid-emergency. It is judged on whether it can be present, credible and specific while they think it over.

Which also means the searches are not interchangeable. A ducted system for a whole house is a different job, a different price expectation and a different person to a single split in a bedroom. So is a heat pump hot water swap, and so is a supply-only enquiry from someone who already has an installer lined up. An account that treats those as one search pays for the privilege, and it pays most in the months when everybody else is bidding hardest.

Gridless Build Solutions arrived with exactly the problem a first month of paid search produces. Enquiries were coming in, but each one cost more than the business could carry. In the earlier of the two periods below, an enquiry cost $78.16. That is the sound of an account spending money to find out what works.

What we took on

The account ran through a single campaign, and the two windows reported here are consecutive periods in 2026 with the dates deliberately withheld. Taken over the whole account rather than one period, it served 9,206 impressions, drew 749 clicks at an 8.14% click-through rate, and recorded 78 enquiries at a blended $62.09 each. Account-wide, 10.41% of clicks became an enquiry. Of those 78 enquiries, 44 were recorded as phone leads, 32 as submitted forms and 2 as calls placed directly from the ad.

An 8.14% click-through rate on a considered purchase is not an accident. It comes from ads written to the specific job the customer is trying to get done rather than to the category at large. Where the customer is comparing, being obviously the right supplier for their particular job is most of the battle before anyone clicks anything.

The history is short and we will not dress it up. Two consecutive periods, both substantial: 16 days in the first and a full 30 in the second. That is enough to establish a direction. It is not enough to establish a season.

The month after the expensive month

Those two bars are the whole argument. An enquiry cost $78.16 in the earlier period and $55.37 in the next — a 29.16% reduction, one month to the next, on the same account, in the same market, against the same competitors.

The line chart says the same thing across time, and it plots only periods of 14 days or more so a part-month cannot flatter the picture. Both periods here qualify comfortably — 16 days in the first, 30 in the second — which is why the comparison is worth making at all.

Underneath it, the bar chart carries the half that most cost-reduction stories quietly leave out. The earlier period produced 23 enquiries. The later one produced 55 — more than double — and it produced them at the lower price rather than in exchange for it.

Cost falling and volume falling together is easy and usually just means the account got timid. Cost falling while volume more than doubles is the combination worth having, and most accounts never manage it.

• Cost per enquiry: $78.16 in the earlier period, $55.37 in the next — down 29.16%
• 55 enquiries in the later period across its 30 days — the account's strongest month for volume
• 491 clicks from 5,817 impressions in that period, with 11.2% of clicks becoming enquiries — up from 8.91% the month before, a 25.65% improvement
• Click-through rate rose from 7.62% to 8.44% between the two
• 8 phone calls recorded in the later period, out of 11 across the account's wider run
• 23 of the later period's enquiries arrived as submitted forms and 31 as phone leads
• 78 enquiries across the account's wider run at a blended $62.09, with an 8.14% click-through rate

Worth setting the expensive month out in full, rather than leaving it as a single figure to be beaten. It ran 16 days, served 3,389 impressions, drew 258 clicks and produced 23 enquiries at $78.16 — 9 of them submitted forms, 13 phone leads and 1 call placed straight from the ad. Nothing about that month was broken. It was an account doing what a new account does: buying information. What changed in the period after it was not the market or the budget, but how much of the money landed on people who were actually going to enquire.

One pattern inside the later period deserves naming, because it is so typical of considered purchases and so often misread. 337 of that period's clicks came from mobile phones and produced 28 enquiries. 129 came from desktop and produced 22. Fewer than half as many clicks, almost as many enquiries. People look up air conditioning on their phone at the kitchen table and commit to it at a computer, and an account judged on click volume alone will get that backwards every time.

What it meant for the business

Fifty-five enquiries in a month, for an air conditioning installer, is a genuinely full quoting schedule. Installation work is high-value and site-specific, so the constraint is usually how many quotes the business can physically get to, not how many it can generate. At that rate the bottleneck moves off the phone and onto the calendar, which is a far better problem to have.

Getting there at $55.37 rather than $78.16 also changes the shape of the year. When the cost of an enquiry drops by that much, the same budget reaches further into the shoulder months — the weeks either side of a peak, when demand is real but thinner and most competitors have pulled their spend back. That is where a seasonal business either smooths its cashflow or spends the quiet months worrying about it.

Which work is worth chasing changes as well. At $78.16 an enquiry, only the larger installs comfortably justify the advertising. At $55.37, smaller jobs and service work start paying for themselves, which matters for an installer trying to keep crews busy between the big projects.

The phone detail is not trivial either. Of the 78 enquiries the account has recorded, 44 were phone leads. A quote conversation that begins as a live call can be qualified on the spot — capacity, timeframe, whether the job is even the right shape for the business — instead of starting as a form and needing three attempts to reach.

Paying too much in your first months?

A high cost per enquiry early on is normal and forgivable. A high cost per enquiry that stays high, month after month, is a decision someone is making on your behalf. If your air conditioning or trades account has settled at an uncomfortable number and nobody has been able to explain why, we will look at it with you and give you a straight answer.