Most trades have a seasonal lean. Heat pump installation has a season, full stop, and a short one. Nobody is thinking about heating in March. Then a genuinely cold night arrives sometime between May and August, a whole region feels it on roughly the same evening, and every installer in the district goes from comfortably busy to weeks-deep in enquiries inside a few days. That shape changes what paid advertising is actually for in this trade. It is less a question of who to target and more a question of when to spend, because the same budget behaves completely differently depending on which side of the cold snap it lands on.
What an ad enquiry looks like for a heat pump installer
Two different buyers click a heat pump ad, and they are not shopping the same way. One has a unit that has stopped working on a cold night, or a house that has never had one, and the cold has just made that decision urgent — they are ringing whoever answers, in order, and stop looking the moment someone competent picks up. The other is planning ahead: replacing an ageing unit before it fails, or finally doing the install they have been meaning to get around to, with time to compare a few installers before deciding. The first buyer wants an answer today. The second is weighing price, brand and who seems easiest to deal with, over days or weeks, and is very likely getting more than one quote.
Both are heat pump enquiries. Both cost money to generate through a campaign. They do not deserve the same reply, and mixing them up — treating an urgent cold-house call like a leisurely quote request, or chasing a considered buyer as if they are about to walk if you do not call back in the hour — wastes the ad spend before the job is even discussed.
Job value sits differently across the two as well. A breakdown call might end up being a repair, a small part, or the start of a conversation about replacing a unit that has finally given up — the caller does not always know which yet, and neither do you until you have asked. A new-install enquiry is usually a bigger ticket from the first message, and it is the one most likely to be compared against at least one other installer’s quote before anyone commits. That difference matters for how a campaign enquiry gets triaged: the breakdown call needs a fast, human answer about what is actually wrong, while the new-install enquiry needs enough detail captured up front — property, rooms involved, timeframe — that a proper quote conversation can start without three rounds of messages just to work out what is being asked for.
Search finds the people already looking; Meta reaches the people who are not yet
Google Search meets someone who has already put the problem into words and gone looking for an answer — that fits the urgent, weather-triggered enquiry almost exactly, because that customer is typing “heat pump not working” or “heat pump installer” for the same reason they are also ringing three other numbers. Meta meets someone mid-scroll who was not thinking about heating at all, which suits the considered, planned-ahead buyer far better, since that person was never going to search for it unprompted — they need the idea put in front of them before the cold arrives and turns it into an emergency.
That reasoning also explains why the two channels want different timing. Search demand for heat pumps is close to nothing outside the cold months and enormous inside them, so it is genuinely reactive — it works because the intent already exists the moment someone types it in. Meta does not depend on that trigger, which is what makes it the channel worth running in the quieter months, reaching people before the wall of search competition arrives.
The worst timing in the whole trade
Here is the part that makes heat pump advertising sharper than almost any other trade on this site: the moment search demand peaks is also the moment every other installer’s search demand peaks, which pushes the cost of that click up at exactly the same time your business is least able to serve what it brings in. You are bidding hardest for enquiries in the same week you are already three weeks booked out. That is not a targeting failure. It is the structure of the trade — everyone gets busy in the same fortnight, so everyone bids in the same fortnight, and the auction gets more expensive precisely when the diary has the least room.
This is what makes the argument this whole site makes sharpest here. An enquiry you paid for during that peak, told honestly “not for three weeks” and actually called back once the diary opens, is worth roughly what you paid for it — the caller waited because they were dealt with straight, not because they had no other option. The same enquiry given a slow reply, or no reply at all, is not a missed opportunity in the ordinary sense. It is money spent at the single most expensive moment of the year, for nothing. How fast to reply to enquiries sets out what a reasonable reply target looks like generally; a paid heat pump enquiry in June is that argument at its most literal, because the cost of being slow is now a line item on an ad account, not an abstraction.
It is worth sitting with why that arithmetic is so unforgiving in this trade specifically. In most trades, being booked out and paying more for ads at the same time is an inconvenience — the enquiry sits a little longer than it would in a quieter month, but it still gets served inside a reasonable window. In heat pump work, “booked out” during the peak can mean genuinely weeks, not days, and the ad auction is at its most expensive during exactly those weeks, because every other installer in the district is bidding into the same short window of demand. Pay the highest price of the year for the click, then let the enquiry sit unanswered for two days while the diary gets sorted out, and the campaign has done the opposite of its job — it has spent real money to generate a caller who then goes and books with whoever answered the phone instead.
The case for spending before the cold arrives
The counter-intuitive move is to put budget into the shoulder season — the weeks before the first proper cold snap, when almost nobody else is bidding for heat pump attention because almost nobody else has customers asking yet. Two things work in your favour there. Competition is thin, so the same spend reaches further than it will in June. And the people you reach have not started comparing three installers on the same afternoon, because the urgency that drives that behaviour has not arrived yet — you are talking to someone before the rush turns them into a shopper working down a list, which tends to produce a calmer conversation and a decision made on its own timeline rather than under pressure from a cold house.
None of that means shoulder-season spend replaces peak-season spend. It means the two are doing different jobs. Peak spend is answering a search that already exists, at a premium, in a market where everyone is competing for the same attention. Shoulder-season spend is creating a decision before it becomes urgent, at a discount, while your diary can still comfortably absorb what it brings in.
The trough is not empty either
Once the cold snap passes, the phone goes quiet, and it is tempting to treat the season as over. It is not empty of opportunity — it is full of the enquiries the peak could not properly serve, if anyone wrote them down. Heat pump enquiries in peak season covers what that looks like in practice: the caller who was told “three weeks” during the rush and is still waiting to hear back, sitting in a list rather than a memory. That list applies to paid enquiries exactly as it applies to free ones, with one difference worth being honest about — a paid enquiry that gets lost in that gap did not just cost you a job, it cost you the ad spend on top. Working that list properly during the quiet stretch is where a chunk of the return on peak-season spend actually gets realised, sometimes weeks after the click that generated it.
The gate
None of this is worth building until the front desk that catches these enquiries is already working. Campaigns multiply whatever your enquiry handling already does, in both directions — for a trade this seasonal, that multiplication happens hardest in the exact fortnight the business is least able to absorb it. We do not run campaigns for heat pump installers until calls, forms and messages are already being answered fast and followed up without depending on anyone’s memory, because buying enquiries into a business that cannot yet get to them is the most expensive mistake available in this trade, and it lands at the worst possible time of year. That order is set out properly on the campaigns page, and the heat pump installers page covers the front desk itself — what gets built first, before any ad account is opened.