HVAC Organic Demand Trends - October 2025
AI referrers now included 👀
👋 Hey, Jon here!
This week’s second issue covers Organic channel performance for the full month of October, including year-over-year data across 100 different HVAC/plumbing businesses spanning the country.
Our data now also includes AI/LLM referrers like ChatGPT!
Organic Unique Lead Volume Increased by 9% Year-over-Year
Unique lead volume (new and existing customers) from organic channels increased by 16% from the prior month and rose 9% year-over-year in this sample.
Note: Some businesses in this sample experienced declines in organic lead volume. The aggregate trend suggests increases, but this may be different in your market or region.
New customer leads from organic channels increased by 10% from the prior month but decreased by 7% year-over-year.
Note: In this analysis, unique leads are defined as the number of individuals who contacted a business through organic channels in the selected time frame.
This does not indicate qualified or non-qualified leads, however, our lead grading showed (for a smaller sample) a 40% bookable rate from Organic channels in October.
The largest reason organic conversions were unbookable was that those individuals were calling in to confirm an appointment.
Most of you likely send text reminders to customers about their appointments on the day of the appointment, but it may be worth adding a text at the beginning of the week to reduce the volume of conversions from existing customers who confirm appointments.
New and Existing Customers Combined:
Booked Customers: +11% from prior month | -4.5% year-over-year
Run Jobs: +6% from prior month | -11% year-over-year
Paying Customers: +12% from prior month | -0.34% year-over-year
New Customers Only:
Booked Customers: +9% from prior month | -5% year-over-year
Run Jobs: +4% from prior month | -10% year-over-year
Paying Customers: +11% from prior month | -1% year-over-year
All key metrics grew month-over-month (notably, a significant performance improvement over September), but lagged in October 2024.
In this sample, businesses got ~372 unique leads from organic in October (new and existing customers) on average.
175 of those booked an appointment, 161 jobs were run, and 88 turned into paying customers.
New customer leads were up 10% month over month but down 7% year over year, with each business averaging 53 new customer leads from organic channels in October.
Just 14% of the total unique organic leads were from new customers - a consistent figure over the last year, hovering in the 15% range.
On average, of the 53 new customer unique leads per business, 30 turned into paying customers (56%) who spent $4,145.11, across all business units.
Existing customer leads converted into paying customers 49% of the time, but spent much less, with an average ticket of $2,578.71.
To summarize, just 14% of organic leads were from new customers, but those new customers accounted for 42% of the total closed revenue from Organic channels.
It Cost $39.17 to Acquire a Paying Customer From Organic Channels in October, Up 1.3% Year-over-Year
Lead volume increased year-over-year and came in at one of the lowest CACs we’ve seen in the last few months at $39.17.
Even though a small percentage of unique leads were new customers (14%), the new customer acquisition cost was lower than we’ve seen in the last few months at $64.73:
Note, I am taking the full Organic spend and dividing it by the number of new customers to get the CAC for new customers.
Last month, it cost $128.68 to acquire a new customer from organic channels; this month, the cost was half that.
Google Business Profile generated the most unique leads (new and existing) and revenue out of the organic channels measured in this sample:
The big three for Organic are clearly GBP, Google Organic, and Bing Organic, but we know there are a lot of eyes on LLMs.
For this subset of 100 contractors, ChatGPT generated 0.23% of all organic leads, 0.15% of the total closed revenue, and just 0.54% of the revenue potential.
Taking it one more step, we’ll look at just new customer data:
Again, Google Business Profiles dominated here, followed by Google and Bing organic.
ChatGPT did generate a higher percentage of new customer leads at 0.42% (more than Facebook organic!) of the total, accounting for 0.35% of closed revenue from new customers and 1.05% of the revenue opportunity from new customers (up very slightly from last month at 1%):
If you add in Perplexity, Gemini, and Microsoft Co-pilot to ChatGPT, LLMs generated 1.36% of the total revenue opportunity from Organic channels via New Customers - we’ll continue to track this each month to see how it trends and if LLMs do begin to move the needle on lead and revenue generation compared to its traditional organic counterparts.
Next up, let’s take a look at average tickets.
Average Tickets Increased by 13.51% Year-over-Year to $3,111.48
For October, average tickets across new and existing customers were $3,111.48, up 13.51% year over year but down 9% month over month.
New customers spent $4,145.11 on average in October, up 28% year-over-year and up 10% month-over-month.
If we go a step further, we can see the breakdown of average tickets by channel across new customers with corresponding lead volumes:
Note, I only took the top 6 organic channels so the tickets are slightly different from what I reported above.
Microsoft Copilot actually generated the highest average ticket from new customers who converted via organic channels at just over $16,000, but it was just 2 customers.
This is more of an additional proof point that individuals who convert via LLMs will spend money than it is for us to expect LLMs to generate a higher average ticket consistently.
In light of these new data points, arguments have been made that individuals who come from LLMs are more likely to convert because they are more informed, but so far the data shows the opposite:
Compared to ‘the big three’, ChatGPT has the lowest book rate and the lowest paying customer rate, indicating no boost in conversion because those customers came from an LLM.
Sold Revenue from Organic Leads Increased 38% Year-over-Year
Sold revenue increased 38% year-over-year but decreased 25% month-over-month.
This is interesting because most of the KPIs (book rate, match rate, paying customer rate) were up MoM, so I thought we’d see an improvement in sold revenue, but it’s also important to consider that closed revenue volume was up 11% MoM.
Overall (new and existing customers), 58% of the total revenue opportunity generated by organic channels converted to sold/closed revenue.
Our suggested target is 50%, so the general trend for organic is outperforming our benchmark.
Now, let’s take a look at closed revenue and closed ROAS for organic channels 👇
Closed Revenue from Organic Leads Decreased by 8% Year-over-Year
Closed revenue volume from organic channels increased by 8% year-over-year and decreased by 11% from the prior month.
Each business in this sample earned $217,239 in closed revenue on average from organic channels (new and existing customers) and $91,275 in closed revenue from new customers only:
The ROI on closed revenue for new and existing customers was 63x (up 15% from the prior month and up 7% year-over-year), while the revenue potential for new and existing customers was 135.3x (up 1.2% MoM, and down 2.5% YoY).
Looking at new customers only, closed revenue was up 15% year-over-year (up 9% from the prior month) with a 26.4x ROI (based on total spend, not just spend on new customers).
Until next time . . .
-Jon