HVAC PPC audit checklist

What a real HVAC PPC audit covers. Conversion tracking integrity (calls + forms + GA4 + Google Ads), search-term quality (anti-service leakage, geo drift, intent-mode mismatch), campaign structure (branded vs. non-branded separation, emergency vs. planned-service), ad copy (message-match against site content, missing call extensions, missing site links), bidding strategy (smart bidding readiness, conversion-window math), landing pages (mobile phone above the fold, page weight, conversion firing), and account hygiene (multiple AW IDs, abandoned campaigns, drift from the original brief). Six to ten findings on a typical account.

The triage rule: tracking comes first. An account with broken conversion tracking is a math problem masquerading as a campaign problem. The audit checks tracking integrity in the first 30 minutes; if it is broken, every other observation runs through "but the data is wrong" and the audit becomes about fixing the foundation before optimizing on top of it. We see this pattern in roughly 60 percent of cold-prospect audits.

The 4-to-8 hour budget. A faster audit is a checklist. A slower audit is a deck. The 4-to-8 hour shape is enough to actually look at the search-term report, eyeball ad copy across campaigns, run the landing pages on a phone, and check conversion firing in the network tab. It is not enough to make recommendations on every dimension of the account; that is a feature. The audit prioritizes the 6 to 10 highest-leverage issues.

What an audit does not produce. Generic best-practice slides. Industry benchmarks pasted from a SaaS dashboard. Recommendations that boil down to "spend more, optimize, refine targeting." Anything that could have been written about an account before opening it.

The audit produces 6 to 10 findings. Not all of them are equally urgent. The triage logic for sequencing the fixes:

Tier 1. Fix this week. Anything that breaks the math. Conversion tracking gaps. Multiple AW IDs creating duplicate conversions. Wrong-service search-term leakage burning visible budget. Missing call extensions on phone-driven campaigns. Branded-search bidding gap (somebody else is buying the prospect's name). These are quick changes with measurable next-week impact.

Tier 2. Fix this month. Structural issues: campaign-structure separation (branded vs. non-branded vs. emergency), landing-page message-match for the highest-spend ad groups, ad-copy rebuilds where copy is weak across the board. These take more work but the lift compounds.

Tier 3. Fix this quarter. Strategic dimensions: bidding-strategy migration if smart bidding is starving from low conversion volume, landing-page rebuilds beyond the highest-spend pages, vertical-specific positioning work (call-out extensions naming brand affiliations, seasonal campaign rotation). These need data + cycles to validate.

The output of the audit is the prioritized list, not a generic recommendations document. Each finding has the observable evidence, the specific fix, the expected impact range, and the implementation effort. The prospect can take the list and run it themselves, hand it to their existing agency, or hire someone (us or otherwise) to execute. The audit is the deliverable; what they do with it is their call.