HVAC Facebook Ads: Real Lead Costs, and When They Beat Google

We run Meta ads for home-improvement lead generation every working day, so this is not a theory piece. Facebook HVAC leads are simultaneously the cheapest lead in the industry and the most complained-about — and both reputations are earned. The difference is entirely in how the campaign is built.

The costs, published

General HVAC inquiries on Meta publish at $20–80 per lead, against $85–150 for Google search. Split by intent the picture sharpens: tune-up offers run $25–65, while genuine system-replacement campaigns run $80–150. And at the bottom of the market, low-friction instant forms can produce $6 leads — one published case study delivered 207 leads at a $5.74 media cost — which tells you nothing until you know how many were reachable humans who owned a house.

Why Facebook leads behave differently

Google is demand capture: the homeowner typed “AC replacement cost” and revealed intent by acting. Meta is demand generation: the ad interrupted someone’s feed and asked a question their aging system made relevant. Both produce real projects. But the published close rates carry the difference — Facebook lead-to-job at 10–25%, Google at 20–35% — because a persuaded homeowner is earlier in their decision than a searching one.

That is not a reason to avoid Meta. It is a reason to use it for what it does that search cannot: reach the owner of a 14-year-old system who hasn’t started searching yet, in a market where LSA has already capped out, in shoulder season when search volume collapses but installed systems keep aging.

The stack that separates junk from real leads

The gap between an $8 fake and a $90-class replacement inquiry is four build decisions:

1. Qualifying questions. One to two questions — homeownership, replacement timeline — is the consensus sweet spot. Practitioners report fake-lead rates dropping from 80%+ to under 20% with qualification layered in, for a cost-per-lead rise of only 15–30%.
2. Higher-intent forms or a real landing page. Meta’s own “higher intent” form type adds a review step; a dedicated quiz landing page goes further. Only about 5% of HVAC advertisers use dedicated landing pages, and they convert 2–3x better than instant forms.
3. Contact verification. Phone validation lifts valid numbers from roughly 60% to 95%; cost per qualified lead falls 40–60% even as raw cost per lead rises.
4. Speed to lead. Meta leads decay in minutes, not days. The practitioner consensus: call inside 5–15 minutes or, as one put it, you’re paying Facebook to donate leads to your competitors.

What this means if you’re buying rather than running ads

If a vendor sells you “Facebook leads” with no qualifying questions and no verification, you are buying the $8 product at a markup. If they qualify intent, verify every contact before charging you, and sell each inquiry to you exclusively, you’re buying something that published US vendors price at $50–200 per lead plus setup fees. That’s the product category we build in — exclusive, verified, replacement-intent inquiries, priced from $69 per accepted lead with no setup fee — and the honest label for it is demand-generated: real declared replacement interest, verified reachable, not a person who typed “buy new furnace today.” Anyone who tells you their social leads are “search intent” is describing a thing that doesn’t exist.