There are ten times more people searching "furnace repair Calgary" than "furnace replacement Calgary." If you treat repair as low-margin nuisance work, you're starving the pipeline that produces your best jobs.
5,000 searches for furnace repair. 500 for furnace replacement.
This is Google's own data for Calgary, not a national average and not an estimate. Check it yourself in Keyword Planner — it takes two minutes.
Two things jump out. The volume sits in the cheap work. And the auction is expensive on everything that isn't.
| Calgary search term | Per month | Top-of-page bid |
|---|---|---|
| duct cleaning | 15,000 | $6.48 – $27.20 |
| furnace repair | 5,000 | $18.31 – $45.37 |
| furnace replacement | 500 | $21.45 – $94.37 |
| new furnace | 500 | $11.37 – $58.77 |
| furnace installation | 500 | $10.27 – $61.96 |
| emergency furnace repair | 500 | $11.48 – $40.94 |
| boiler repair | 500 | $15.06 – $41.41 |
| air conditioning installation | 500 | $14.16 – $52.18 |
Source: Google Keyword Planner, location set to Calgary, 12 months to August 2026. Volumes are Google's rounded buckets. Bids are top-of-page ranges, not what you'd necessarily pay.
But there are ten times more repair searches. Put those two facts together and the strategy writes itself.
5,000 people a month in Calgary search for furnace repair. Only 500 search for replacement. Homeowners don't wake up wanting a new furnace — they wake up cold.
A repair is $300 to $600. A replacement is $6,000 to $15,000. Same customer, fifteen to twenty-five times the value, decided in the same basement conversation.
Cut repair spend because the ticket looks small and you cut the channel that puts your tech next to a twenty-year-old furnace. That's where the replacement conversation happens.
If your reporting credits a repair campaign with repair revenue only, it will always look marginal — and you'll always underfund it. The fix is tracking what those calls turn into over the following ninety days.
Separate campaigns, separate budgets, separate landing pages. An 11pm "furnace not working" search and a Tuesday-afternoon "furnace replacement cost" search are different buyers at different prices. One campaign called "furnace" overpays on both.
We set up tracking that follows a repair lead through to whatever it becomes. Once you can see that a share of repair calls turn into five-figure jobs, the budget decision gets obvious instead of arguable.
A −25°C snap triples furnace searches in 48 hours and flattens by Thursday. A budget capped at the shoulder-season daily amount goes dark by noon during exactly the days that matter.
Left alone, furnace campaigns quietly buy "hvac technician jobs", "furnace filter home depot" and homeowners hunting a DIY fix. At $18 to $45 a click that adds up inside a week, not a quarter.
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Both, in separate campaigns. Calgary has roughly 5,000 monthly searches for furnace repair against 500 for replacement. That ten-to-one split means most replacement sales begin as a repair call rather than a replacement search. Cutting repair spend because the ticket is small usually starves the pipeline that produces your replacements.
Top-of-page bids run $18.31–$45.37 for furnace repair and $21.45–$94.37 for replacement, with competition rated High on both. The auction is expensive because the work is valuable. The answer is structure and tracking, not trying to out-bid everyone in the city.
It's by far the biggest category in Calgary — around 15,000 searches a month — and clicks are cheaper at $6.48–$27.20. But the ticket is a few hundred dollars, so the margin is thin. It works as a foot in the door if you track what those customers are worth over the following year. It doesn't work as your main campaign.
Both have real but smaller demand in Calgary — roughly 600 and 800 searches a month respectively. Boiler work carries a high ticket and a thinner auction, which makes it a good secondary campaign if you do that work. HRV and ventilation, by contrast, show essentially no search volume here. We'd tell you not to bother.
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We'll open your Google Ads account, show you the wasted spend and the missed search terms, and tell you what your real cost per booked job is. Free, and yours to keep either way.