A Home Services Company Tried TikTok 'as a Joke'. It's Now Their Cheapest Lead Source.
Everyone said TikTok wouldn't work for a 50-year-old HVAC business. The CAC says otherwise.
A family-owned HVAC contractor in the Pacific Northwest was paying about $48 per qualified lead through Google Local Services Ads. Their owner, in his 60s, agreed to “try TikTok for a month” mostly to humor his marketing manager.
The creative
Three videos, all shot on an iPhone by a 22-year-old service tech:
- “Things I find inside furnaces” — a tour of bizarre items pulled out of customer HVAC systems (toys, dead rodents, a wedding ring). 1.8M views.
- “How to tell if your AC is about to die” — five signs, shot in 45 seconds. 600k views.
- “What a $400 service call looks like vs a $4,000 one” — side by side. 1.2M views.
Total production cost: roughly $0, plus the tech’s time.
The test
The contractor ran the videos as Spark Ads, geotargeted to a 30-mile radius. We used a holdout: half the ZIP codes in that radius were excluded from the campaign and used as a control group for organic lead volume.
- Spend: $4,200 over 30 days
- Reported leads: 412
- Holdout-corrected (incremental) leads: 348
- True cost per qualified lead: ~$12
For comparison, in the same period, Google LSAs averaged $48/lead and Facebook conversion ads averaged $61/lead.
What worked
Three things, in order of importance:
- The creative felt native. No logo intro, no music sting, no “professional” production. It looked like every other TikTok in the user’s feed.
- The hook in the first 2 seconds was visual. The thumbnail of a dead mouse from a furnace did more work than any copy ever could.
- The CTA was soft. No “Call now for a free quote” — just “Comment your zip and we’ll tell you if we service your area.” The comments became a lead funnel of their own.
What didn’t work
The owner also tried two “professional” videos shot by a local agency. They cost $1,800 total and generated 9 leads. The agency style — drone shots of trucks, polished voiceover, swoosh transitions — actively hurt performance.
What they did next
- Tripled TikTok budget to $12k/month
- Hired the service tech part-time as their “video guy”
- Cut Google LSA spend by 40% (kept it for emergency-keyword high-intent traffic)
- Started a YouTube Shorts repost pipeline for the same content
The lesson
Channels don’t have inherent CACs. Creative does. A boring channel with a great native ad will beat a “high-intent” channel with a generic one, every time. The right question isn’t “does TikTok work for HVAC?” — it’s “do we have someone who can make a video that doesn’t look like an ad?”
If yes, almost any channel works. If no, no amount of targeting will save you.