How Do Install Leads Convert on HVAC Websites?
October 2022 Analysis
👋 Hey, Jon here! I wanted to do a second article this week detailing how install customers converted on HVAC websites from paid ads. I touched on this briefly in my previous newsletter but wanted to expand on it here. Note: this expanded analysis includes open estimates, sold jobs and closed/completed jobs.
If you prefer video content, I highly recommend you listen to a clip from this interview I did with CallSource - the link starts at 10:44 and it’s worth listening through to 12:32 that explains why this data is so powerful and how you can use it for your business.
Breaking Down The Percentage of Install Leads by Conversion Tool
When evaluating revenue flow, we look at two key action points from the customer:
The marketing channel that drove a customer to the website (or click-to-call)
The way the customer submitting their information to the contractor
This tells us how customers find you in a moment of need and how they choose to contact your business, which provides useful insights to improve both the channel and conversion tool strategy.
This time, we’re only looking at leads that led to an estimate or an HVAC installation.
Phone again drove the majority of lead volume at 72%, with the rest of the conversion tools accounting for 28% of converted leads:
📱Phone - 72%
📅 Online Scheduling - 12%
📝 Form - 10%
⌨️ Chat - 6%
We’ve typically found in our data that phone calls consistently convert 78-79% of lead volume, but in the case of installations it was 6% lower.
Compared to previous data (this was a smaller sample size of HVAC contractors who offered phone, forms, online scheduling, and chat on their websites), the distribution looks quite different:
This isn’t an apples-to-apples comparison, but online scheduling converted 12% of installation leads, compared to 7% in the above sample.
Chat also converted 6% of install leads, versus 3% of total leads in the above sample.
Booked job rates and average tickets matter significantly in how well those converted leads turn into revenue (which I’ll get into below) but it’s interesting to see that a higher percentage of install leads converted via online booking, chat and form.
Analyzing The Booked Job Rate of Install Leads by Conversion Tool
While phone calls still drove the highest install lead volume by a wide margin, we also want to look at how well those leads turned into sold or closed jobs.
Note: Sold jobs means an estimate has been accepted but the work hasn’t been completed (scheduled at a future date). Closed jobs means the work has been completed.
Install leads that converted through online scheduling ended up with the highest booked job rate of any conversion tool at 63.3%, which is ~11% higher than the booked job rate of install leads that called the business:
📅 Online Scheduling - 63.3%
⌨️ Chat - 58%
📝 Form - 53.7%
📱Phone - 52.8%
With a higher booked job rate, you need fewer leads to get the same revenue (if the average tickets are equal).
But as we’ll see below, some conversion tools drove higher average tickets than the rest.
Analyzing The Average Ticket of Install Leads by Conversion Tool
In this sample, the highest average tickets were from leads that converted via forms, followed by chat, phone and online scheduling.
Keep in mind, average tickets were down 13% from August to September and remained largely unchanged (+0.8% in October) due to more discounting because of the shoulder season.
I expect these numbers to change in the winter (which will be analyzed), but nonetheless it’s interesting to see how much money customers spent based on how they converted on the site:
📝 Form - $8,209.84
⌨️ Chat - $7,205.98
📱Phone - $6,476.38
📅 Online Scheduling - $4,782.07
Next, we’ll look at the percentage of sold and closed revenue by conversion tool, which factors in (1) lead volume (2) booked job rates (3) average tickets.
Analyzing The Percentage of Total Install Sold/Closed Revenue by Conversion Tool
Because form leads had the average highest ticket, the tool drove 12% of the total closed/sold revenue despite converting only 10% of the leads.
Online scheduling, which had the lowest ticket out of the conversion tools, drove 10% of sold/closed revenue with 12% of the leads.
Chat drove 8% of sold/closed revenue with 6% of the leads, and phone calls drove 70% of sold/closed revenue with 72% of the leads:
📱Phone - 70% of sold/closed revenue
📝 Form - 12% of sold/closed revenue
📅 Online Scheduling - 10% of sold/closed revenue
⌨️ Chat - 8% of sold/closed revenue
In this case, 30% of sold/closed install revenue did not convert via phone calls.
Closing Thoughts
Evaluating conversion tool performance can help you do three things:
(1) Understand customer behavior on websites to make adjustments based on trends and patterns
(2) Uncover poor lead handling by conversion tool that might be affecting performance
(3) Reduce your marketing cost on revenue by helping you prioritize actions with limited resources
As the “r word” (recession) is thrown around more and more, you might think twice before paying to add another conversion tool to your site.
Or you might be looking at your bills wondering if there’s something you need to cut.
Or, you might ask your teams to step up and cover more responsibility.
Monitoring the above metrics by conversion tool can help you identify where you are leaking revenue and be very specific about the actions you take to remedy that without needing to spend a lot of money or resources.
As I mentioned in the intro, you can find my expanded thoughts on this in an interview I did with CallSource - the link starts at 10:44 and it’s worth listening through to 12:32.
Look out for my newsletter early next week, which will summarize and analyze impression to sold job data for the month of October.
Until next time . . .
-Jon